Chrissie's Children (2 page)

She told herself that Ballantyne’s yard would not close, because that was unthinkable. But these were hard times and there were more ahead. Every day she saw men, dressed in the suits that
they usually wore only at weekends, trudging into the railway station, carrying cheap suitcases. They were going south to look for work because their yard had shut and they could not find a job in
the town. Their wives would come with them to wave them goodbye, then trudge home alone, to manage as best they could.

Could that happen to her? Chrissie silently vowed that she would hold her family together, come what may. For the sake of the children. And with that resolve she thrust her worries behind her
for a time and turned to her work.

The sudden silence tore Sarah Tennant from her play, as a sleeping seaman wakes when the engines of his ship cease turning. She realised her father’s coughing had stopped
and saw Isabel Tennant run across the yard and into the house. The silence dragged on for long seconds then Sarah heard her mother scream and was herself afraid.

Summer 1935

Sarah Tennant woke and her first thoughts were of Fannon. She was just fourteen years old and her fear of Joshua Fannon – squat, fat and leering – was always
lurking at the back of her mind. His presence seemed to hang over the house like one of the shipyard cranes that towered above the surrounding streets. Then she remembered that this was not the day
the landlord would call for his rent for the two dilapidated rooms in which Sarah and her mother lived.

She relaxed for a moment then remembered how important this day was. She slipped out of the bed she shared with her widowed mother and drew back the worn and faded curtains. The lace curtains
behind them were yellow and ragged with age. She stared through them, the cracked linoleum cold on her bare feet. A line of cranes lifted long arms high above the boundary wall of a shipyard, all
of them still. That yard had been closed for a year now.

The sky was clear and bright with dawn light. Sarah thought that it would be a fine day. The bairns were home from school – a holiday – and before noon the sun would have softened
the tarmacadam of the street. They would pick it out to roll between their palms and make marbles. Sarah smiled, forgetting she was little more than a child herself, small and slight with wide dark
eyes in a thin face.

She picked up her clothes from a chair and tiptoed out into the other room, the kitchen and living-room. There was no fire in the blackleaded grate and the coal bucket in the hearth was empty.
She washed in a bowl on the kitchen table then breakfasted on bread and margarine with a cup of tea brewed on a gas-ring standing in the hearth. She ate hungrily, despite her excitement and
nervousness.

‘Sarah?’ her mother called.

‘Coming, Mam!’ Sarah helped Isabel to wash and dress, then shuffle out, coughing and panting, to sit in her armchair by the empty fireplace. Dr Dickinson had said, ‘It’s
consumption. She has to rest,’ so Isabel spent her days a prisoner in the old armchair.

Sarah prepared the same breakfast for her mother. As Isabel was eating it Sarah cried, ‘Milkman!’ She had heard the iron wheels of the two-wheeled milk cart. She snatched up a jug
and ran out into the street. The horse stood patiently in the shafts as its driver ladled a half-pint of milk from the churn on the cart and poured it into Sarah’s jug. She paid with a penny
from the few in her mother’s purse.

Sarah washed up the cups and plates then changed into her best cotton dress, made from one that had been her mother’s. She looked at the clock on the mantelpiece and saw it was still
early, but that was all to the good. She said, ‘I’ll make a start now.’

Isabel Tennant agreed, ‘Aye, get there afore time. Tell the lass behind the desk that you want to see Mrs Ballantyne. When you get to see her, tell her who you are. I remember her when she
was Chrissie Carter and she’s not one to forget. I worked part time for her years ago, afore I went into the factory. I did that for more money when your dad died, but it was long hours and
heavy. If I’d stopped wi’ Chrissie I might ha’ been all right now.’ She stopped then as the coughing racked her again.

‘I’ll tell her.’ Sarah stroked her mother’s hair, kissed her cheek and left.

‘Coal! Tuppence a stone!’ the coalman bellowed, mouth pink in a black-dusted face as his horse-drawn cart turned into the street. Sarah did not pause. There was no money for coal in
her house and they could manage without as long as the weather did not turn cold.

She walked the two miles or so to save the tram fare. Once she passed a group of girls playing ball against a wall with the dexterity of professional jugglers and chanting, ‘Raspberry,
strawberry, marmalade and jam, tell me the name of my young man . . .’ Only weeks ago she had played like that. And she was a star pupil at her lessons. Her teacher had sighed when Sarah had
turned down the chance to go to grammar school.

Crossing the bridge – ‘ganning ower the watter’ – she looked up and down the river running in its steep-sided ravine. There were few ships lying alongside the quays and
being fitted out, fewer still lying building on the stocks. Sarah knew that this was part of the depression, one of the reasons for the poverty around her, the workmen standing idle at street
corners. However, the lack of work in the shipyards did not directly affect her – women were not allowed to work in the yards anyway.

She paused a moment outside the front doors of the Railway Hotel, smoothed down her dress and ran her hands over her hair. She had washed it in rainwater from the butt the night before so that
it shone. She took a deep breath and walked in, thin and nervous and straight in the back.

In the Ballantyne house an hour earlier Chrissie put down the letter from Elsie Massingham and swore silently yet again that she would hold this family of hers together. She
looked around the oval breakfast table, set in the window at one end of the huge dining-room that ran from front to back of the house. The other, long table that would seat more than a score of
people was set back against the wall, its polished surface gleaming and empty save for a bowl of flowers from the garden. Overhead hung the huge chandelier, sparkling with reflected sunlight. She
remembered dancing in this room with Jack, just the two of them, the night Matthew was conceived, and later when she and Jack were engaged.

A smile twitched her lips then, remembering. Jack caught that smile as he entered. He was tall and lean in a dark blue suit and white shirt with a starched collar. There were flecks of grey now
at the temples in his thick, black hair. He dropped a briefcase, bulging with work he had brought home the previous night, on a vacant chair and asked, ‘Penny for them?’ But Chrissie
pressed her lips together and shook her head, eyes laughing. As he passed behind her chair he touched her shoulder and she shivered and leaned back into his hand for a moment.

He moved over to the sideboard, greeting the boys as he went: ‘Morning, Tom, Matt. Where’s Sophie?’ though he guessed the answer to that.

Tom, a sixteen-year-old copy of his father with the same black hair and neat in a dark blue suit, but dark eyed, answered, ‘Morning, Dad. I think I heard her. I expect she’s busy
with something in her room, be down shortly,’ making an excuse for his sister, as usual.

Jack did not believe him and cocked a cynical eye at Chrissie, but accepted the explanation. ‘Hum.’ He picked up a hot plate from the sideboard and helped himself to eggs, bacon and
sausages from the dishes there. He said again, louder, ‘Good morning, Matt!’

His younger son was not quite sixteen, lanky in baggy grey flannel trousers and a white cricket shirt open at the neck. His sandy hair was unruly and growing down to his collar. He turned from
staring vacantly out of the window and blinked vague light blue eyes at his father. ‘Sorry. Good morning.’

‘Dreaming again,’ Jack said half affectionately, half irritated, then shook his head and sat down opposite his wife.

Betty Price, the maid, a rosy-cheeked country girl smart in black dress, white apron and cap, bustled in with fresh coffee and toast. She set them on the table then whisked up Chrissie’s
and the boys’ emptied plates and carried them out. Chrissie automatically watched to see it was done properly, as she supervised all the work of the house. She had done it all herself in her
time.

Now she handed the letter to Tom, asking him, ‘Pass that to your father, please.’

Tom obeyed and Jack took it, brows raised, then read as he ate. Chrissie followed the example of the boys and buttered toast, going over the contents of the letter in her mind. Elsie Massingham
had written from California that her husband Phillip had lost every penny he had in the Wall Street crash of 1929 and two years later was sacked from his job as a film director. Since then he had
failed to find work. Elsie wrote: ‘It seems he antagonised the studio bosses, refusing to abandon his principles and do as he was told.’ Now he had suffered a nervous breakdown and run
off. He had left a note saying that he would not be a burden and would rather live the life of a tramp.

Chrissie had invested her money in Phillip’s company, Massingham Films, when he was a near-penniless, crippled ex-officer. She was desperately sorry for him and his family now. ‘I
wish we could do something for him, Jack.’

He shook his head and sighed, ‘That isn’t possible because we don’t know where he is. Hollywood has closed its doors to him so he won’t be able to work in films. It will
be impossible for an Englishman to get any other kind of job. He’s one of eleven million unemployed in the States right now. Five thousand banks collapsed and nine million savings accounts
went down the drain. There are all kinds of men, lots of them professionals, tramping the streets or riding boxcars on the railways, all looking for work. Hoboes they call them. But –’
and he tapped the letter, ‘– we can send a cheque to his wife.’

Chrissie nodded, ‘We’ll do that.’ It was something, but she left the toast, not wanting it now.

Matt had eaten two slices with marmalade after a plateful of eggs and bacon. He now said, ‘You look like a bookie’s clerk in that suit, Tom.’

His brother only grinned at the intended insult. He wore the suit because this was the day he was starting work. He had wanted to work in the shipyards almost from the time he could walk.
Chrissie wondered, not for the first time, at the coincidence that Tom was the spitting image of Jack. Matt on the other hand had Jack’s pale blue eyes – or had they come from his
grandmother, Hilary? Matt would have Jack’s height when grown, and was tall as Tom now, but skinny as a beanpole.

Now Jack spread marmalade on toast and said, ‘Car, Matt.’

‘Right!’ For once Matt moved quickly, and was out of his chair and the room in a few long strides.

Minutes later Jack drained his coffee cup and stood up. Chrissie and Tom followed him out into the hall. Pearson, the young footman, waited there with Tom’s suitcase. All the other
servants, the two maids and the cook, were there to see off Tom. Only the part-time gardener was missing. There were no longer a butler and the dozen or so servants that had been in the house ten
years ago. The vacuum cleaner, electric cooker and central heating – its boiler stoked by Pearson – had replaced them.

‘’Bye, Tom!’ Sophie leaned over the banister at the head of the stairs, making nonsense of Tom’s excuse for her absence. She was still in pyjamas, blonde hair tousled.
She was just short of fifteen years old now and still a schoolgirl, but the body inside the pyjamas was that of a young woman.

Young Pearson stared woodenly to his front, embarrassed, and Chrissie snapped, scandalised, ‘
Get dressed!
’

Tom added, teasing, ‘Really, Sophie!’

She grinned at him, ‘Don’t you start!’ Normally she and her brothers gambolled and scrambled like three puppies. Now she called, ‘Good luck!’ and meant it, and blew
him a kiss. Then she slid a sideways glance at Pearson and Chrissie’s lips tightened. Sophie saw that and scurried away.

Outside on the drive sat the car, a black Ford V8 saloon – the Rolls was only used now for special occasions, just for show. Matt had driven the Ford round from the garage, the former
stables at the back of the house. Now he got down and Chrissie took his place, Jack at her side and Tom in the rear. Benson, the chauffeur, had retired years ago and had not been replaced, just one
of many economies. As Chrissie steered the car down the gravelled drive the house spread wide in the rear-view mirror, the tower lifting high at its centre.

She drove down into the town, stopped at the station and got down with Tom. Jack slid over behind the wheel as Tom hauled his suitcase from the car.

Jack held out a hand. ‘Be careful. And good luck.’

Tom shook it, smiling, excited. ‘Thanks, Dad.’ Then he looked down at the folded pound note in his palm, laughed and said again, ‘Thanks!’

Jack drove away, smiling, but still felt a twinge of worry. Tom was a young man now, serious and responsible, but he was going out into the world and a shipyard could be a
dangerous place, hence the warning to him to be careful. Jack had drummed that into him over the years, but a reminder did no harm. And Tom would not be kept out of the yard, that had always been
clear. The same could not be said of Matt, unfortunately . . .

A frown creased Jack’s brow for an instant, but then he was turning the Ford in at the big, open gates of the Ballantyne yard and the frown faded as he felt the surge of pride that always
came over him as he entered. His great-grandfather had started the yard back in the 1850s. Jack was the fourth generation to build ships here. The frown returned as he wondered bleakly if he would
be the last.

‘You will be careful?’ Chrissie repeated the warning. She had been brought up alongside the yards and heard all the stories of men falling from staging, being
crushed, drowned or their skulls cracked by dropped tools.

Tom promised patiently, ‘Yes, mother.’

‘And send me a postcard tonight to let me know you’ve settled into your lodgings all right.’