Christmas Wish (2 page)

When she opened her eyes again nothing had changed. The weather was still bitingly cold though her father, Joseph Brodie, strode along as though the day was fine and a bitter wind was not beating into their faces.

The small girl at his side would only come to know when she was older that confidence was her father’s shield against the world and the guilt within him. He was ripping the family apart, but Joseph Brodie was a selfish man who people – especially women – found easy to love. Besides that, he was not a man ever to admit that what he was doing was wrong.

She saw the grim surroundings, the alleys piercing between terraces of dirty red brick houses, the smell of dirt, drains and smoke from chimneys. It was hard to be brave. She didn’t feel brave. She felt helpless.

Finally she found her voice. ‘When will I see our Venetia again?’

‘In time. In time.’ His response was curt though bright as though everything in the world was lovely.

His grip on her hand tightened. Perhaps he suspected she had it in mind to run away, but she was a child. It was in her nature to love those close to her, to trust her father just as she had her mother.

‘When will I see my sisters and brother again?’

‘When things are better. I’ve told you. All the details of where they’ll be living are in yer mother’s Bible. Still, you saw them at Christmas. Despite everything you had Christmas together. Now wasn’t that a good thing?’

Magda had to concede that it was. The family had clung together and she’d tried her best, as the eldest, to reassure them that everything would be fine.

‘When you come home again, will you buy that house by the sea that our mama talked about where we can all be together?’

‘Is that what she told you?’ He sounded more than surprised; perhaps a little taken aback.

‘Yes. And we’ll all live with you, together, and next Christmas I shall cook us all Christmas dinner with a turkey – or perhaps a chicken,’ she added, changing her mind because he might think a turkey too expensive. And after all, if he was going to buy a cottage by the sea, wouldn’t that be better than a turkey? And houses cost money. Her mother had told her so when she’d questioned why they lived in two cold rooms in a shared house.

She swiped a hand at the tears clinging to her lashes, her fingers cold despite the thickness of her knitted mitten. The New Year had blown in bitterly cold with the threat of snow.

The sky was no more than a ribbon between the cramped roofs and crooked chimneys of the narrow streets they trod.
She noticed that some windows in the tiny houses still had paper chains or pretend snow, no more than bits of cotton wool stuck to the panes. A few more days, perhaps only hours, and the real thing would start to fall. It was that cold.

Every so often her father, Joe Brodie, would glance at her, see that she was far from happy, and then commence to tell her how grand things would be when he once again returned from sea.

‘And I’ll buy you a dolly with eyes that close and she’ll be wearing a pink dress.’

The rag doll she was carrying beneath her arm was the one thing connecting her present with her past and had been given to her by a kindly neighbour some years before. This year’s Christmas present had been a colouring book and some crayons. It was stuffed into the paper carrier bag that swung from her father’s left hand along with the few bits of clothes she owned.

The cobbles were slippery underfoot, the afternoon fast turning into a wintry twilight.

Magda shivered. She was the eldest so her father had told her to be his big brave girl and to be an example to the little ones. Being brave, she’d decided, wasn’t easy and she didn’t like this place he’d brought her to. At least the workhouse had become familiar territory even though she had only resided there for a few months.

Despite the biting wind, Magda raised her head, narrowing her eyes as she took in the drab surroundings with increasing dismay. Her nose wrinkled at the smell of old drains, decay and dirt.

‘Dad. I don’t like it here. This place stinks.’

Though her mouth was muffled by her scarf, her voice was clear.

Her father shook his head, refusing to admit that things
were bad because that’s the way he was. The arrangements he’d made for his children suited him and that was all that mattered. He was blind to anything else.

‘Now, now, Magda my girl. You’re overreacting. It’s poor but honest around here and your aunt will be good to you. You just see. Everything will be fine, my girl.’

Her mother had come from Italy, a place, she’d told Magda, where the sun always shone.

Joseph Brodie had sailed into Naples and charmed the dark-haired, dark-eyed young girl into marrying him. With his melodic voice, his broad shoulders and his dancing blue eyes, the handsome Irishman had stolen her heart away. ‘Love at first sight,’ she’d said to her children in her lilting voice before a sad look had come over her features. ‘I loved him despite all his faults, his many faults, and I love him still.’

The fact was that for all his charm, Joseph Brodie was feckless; there was no way he could settle down to a life with a wife and children, tied to the land. He reckoned the sea was in his blood. The fortune he’d promised his bride never came their way.

Isabella Julieta Brodie had worked at anything and everything she could to keep a roof over their heads and bread on the table. Eventually the hard work and starvation rations had caught up with her. Eventually they were turned out of their lodgings and sent to the workhouse. Though the diet was basic it was better than they’d had and her mother had promised there were better times to come once she was back on her feet. ‘Especially when your father comes home. We will all be happy then.’

With her last breath her mother had expressed her love for her husband and asked the nice nurse to tell the children to behave for him.

It wasn’t to say that Joseph Brodie wasn’t upset by his
wife’s death. He was, though the fact that his children needed him was not something he wished to face. Going to sea was a habit he found difficult to break. It was as though he had two lives – one with his wife and one with his shipmates, visiting one port after another all over the world. ‘Anyway,’ he said to those who would listen. ‘What would I be doing living on the land, working in a factory or a mine, even on me father’s farm? It wouldn’t suit. That it wouldn’t. Not at all.’

Just for a while though, his exuberance for life at sea was temporarily jettisoned in favour of a brief mourning.

On the day of Magda’s departure, the three older children had clasped their arms around each other, shivering and sobbing into each other’s shoulders. Baby Michael had looked up at them wide eyed and frightened until he too was crying for someone he didn’t yet know that he’d lost. Magda had exchanged a soft whisper with her twin sisters.
No matter what, we must be strong for each other.

She also promised them that one day they would have that Christmas dinner in a place to call home. She didn’t know when it would be, but it would happen. ‘I swear to you it will. And I’ll send you a Christmas card every year and write you letters. That’s what people do when they’re not together.’

Daring to hope that things really would be better, Magda had asked her father couldn’t he reconsider and all of them live together and he not go to sea any more?

He’d shaken his head.

‘I can’t stay, Magda. I have to go. I have a living to make. But first I’ll make arrangements for you all. You’ll all be fine. You’ll be sorted. I promise.’

‘And all the places where each of you are living are in yer mother’s Bible,’ he said. ‘Magda’s the eldest. Magda will keep it with her. Right, Magda?’

For his part, Joseph Brodie told himself he was doing the
right thing, though deep down, if he was honest, he would have to admit that he was behaving as he’d always behaved. No matter who loved him and who he loved – in his own way of course – he tended to do things to suit himself. Yes, he felt grieved that he hadn’t been there for his wife, but he blamed others for that; the wages on board every ship he’d ever worked on, every far-flung port where the bartenders relieved him of his hard-earned cash, and – once drunk as a lord – every dockside whore who’d reminded him of his wife.

Close to the city docks, terraced houses, crumbling from years of neglect by absentee landlords, lined cobbled streets.

This part of London was home to all manner of folk, poor, honest and dishonest. Poverty and crime rubbed shoulders out of necessity. Making a living by any means possible meant holding onto life. Only the coffin maker on the corner of Cocks Passage and Edward Street, the street they were heading for, had an unending source of business.

Creaking signs above lopsided doorways advertised chimney sweeps and cobblers. Old inns rubbed shoulders with rope makers, coopers and tenements housing at least one family on each floor.

Pale-faced children peered from dark interiors or played out in the street with bits of wood or stones. The former were floated on sooty puddles, the fallout from the smoking chimney pots, the gas works and the coal yard at the end of the street where it abutted the river. Little had changed since the Great War.

A man sitting against the wall outside the pub begged them for alms. He was wearing the top half of an old navy uniform. Three or four medals dangled from the breast pocket.

Her father stopped. ‘Where did you serve?’

‘Jutland. German eight inch took me legs off.’

Magda noticed the man was sitting on a wooden board that
had wheels on. She noticed with the fascination a child feels for the unusual that he had no legs.

Her father tossed him a coin. ‘Have a half on me, old fellah. I wasn’t so far from there meself.’

The man’s face lit up. ‘You’re an officer and a gentleman.’

Joseph laughed. ‘Sure I am. How did you guess?’

The man disappeared into the pub, the door swinging shut behind him, though not before a hubbub of conversation, stale smells and amber light had fallen out onto the pavement.

In an oppressive street beneath an oppressive January sky, Joseph Brodie knocked at the battered door of his sister-in-law.

The house was a straightforward two-up, two-down terraced, one of about eight all strung together, and it looked the poorest in the street.

Aunt Bridget was married to James Brodie, Joseph’s brother, who worked as an able seaman on the pig boats that plied between London and Cork. Irish pork was best, according to Bridget Brodie, leanest and freshest. ‘Sure, isn’t it slaughtered just on down the road here?’

Joseph Brodie knew this was true. Depending on the wind, the screams of the pigs smelling blood and death travelled from the slaughterhouse with unnerving regularity.

Bridget Brodie did not possess the same calm tone as her brother-in-law. Neither was she purposeful in her movements; darting around and doing everything at breakneck, slapdash speed. Being bereft of children had made her bitter, though perhaps because he was a man, Joseph Brodie couldn’t see what she’d become. If he had perhaps he would have thought twice about leaving his daughter there.

Her sharp eyes, blue in a complexion that erred towards pink, as though she’d been toasted in front of the fire, fixed on Magda. ‘She has her mother’s colouring. The others had yours. I saw them once.’

‘Would you hold that against her?’

She shrugged. ‘I’ll not speak ill of the dead, though you know my thoughts on foreigners.’ She crossed her flat chest in a swift, stabbing movement. ‘We’ve got enough of them in this place as it is. Jews one end, blacks the other – God knows but this place is going downhill.’

‘’Tis only to be expected, you living so close to the docks, ships come into London from all over the world. You’re bound to get people here from all over.’

Bridget Brodie eyed him sharply. ‘That don’t mean they have to stay here. I see them go in across the way there too,’ she said, nodding towards the house across the street. ‘’Tis a whorehouse, you know. My God,’ she said, crossing herself again, ‘what would my old mother think if she knew her daughter was living opposite a whorehouse?’

‘Sure you don’t know that for sure.’

‘Too right I do, Joe Brodie. Men, mostly sailors, going in and out of there at all hours. ’Tis disgraceful I say. Plain disgraceful!’

Controlling any hint of guilt, Brodie looked across to a gabled building, its upper floor overhanging the lower. It had likely been there since the first sailor sauntered past smoking a rolled-up leaf of best Virginian tobacco and wondering what he could do with the potatoes he’d also brought back with him.

For the first time since laying his plan, he experienced a twinge of doubt, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. He firmly believed that in a few years, the ten-year-old Magda would be close to being a woman and as such needed female guidance and certainly not the likes of him. She might find it hard at first, perhaps, but she’d thank him for it later. Sure she would, and wasn’t his sister-in-law an upright, God-fearing woman?

‘You’ll do the Christian thing?’ he said as he counted out
ten shillings into her waiting palm. ‘There’s some to be going on with. I’ll get more to you later.’

Her sharp eyes softened at the sight of coins tumbling into her palm. ‘That I will,’ she said, a smile curving her lips. If he’d looked closer he would have seen that her smile did not travel to her eyes. She tucked the coins down the neck of her cheap dress between her breasts and sighed with satisfaction.

She saw his eyes follow the progress of the money into her cleavage and it warmed her. Suddenly her attitude changed. The red-faced woman with her squinty eyes and overblown figure took on the simpering attributes of a streetwise girl, one whose sole purpose in life was seducing a man she had a fancy for.

‘Will you stay and have a cup of tea with me? Or stay a bit longer and go to the pub tonight?’

He shook his head. ‘I’ve got to go and deliver my other kids to where they’re going. The addresses where they’ll be found are all in here.’

He lifted the Bible then looked at Magda, the doubt about leaving her still in evidence, but slowly retreating in the face of expediency.