Lonely Teardrops (2008) (2 page)

A more frightening thought pierced her pain. What if Stan Ashton weren’t her real father? Oh, no, that would be unbearable.

She glanced at the many friends come to pay their last respects. There was Belle Garside, looking as voluptuous and flashy as ever in a too-tight black skirt and high heels that were rapidly sinking into the mud. Winnie and Barry Holmes, Big Molly Poulson weeping quietly into her handkerchief, Jimmy Ramsay, the big red-cheeked butcher, Alec Hall and Sam Beckett, both ex-service men, together with several members of the Bertalone clan.

Did these people also know the truth about her birth? Were they in on this so-called secret which had been so carefully kept from her? And what was the truth? Who was her mother, if it wasn’t Joyce? Fear gnawed at her, chilling her soul.

Harriet felt a gentle hand squeeze her arm and looked into her grandmother’s sympathetic brown eyes.

‘Are you all right, chuck?’ Rose whispered, and Harriet nodded, although it was a lie. She felt ill, sick to her stomach, as if there were a great weight on her heart. Her head throbbed with the effort of not crying when all she wanted to do was fall to her knees and sob. What was happening to her? Why did her life seem to be unravelling before her very eyes?

She swallowed her tears, knowing her mother hated any display of emotion in public and had given her strict orders to keep a stiff upper lip throughout, no matter what she might feel inside. Harriet’s lower lip, however, was trembling, and she gratefully accepted the clean handkerchief her grandmother handed her to surreptitiously wipe her eyes and blow her dripping nose.

Somehow Harriet got through the short funeral service, barely hearing the priest talk about Stan Ashton, the war hero, who had nearly died for his country. Seriously wounded in 1944, he’d endured a number of operations till finally he’d lost a leg and been confined to a wheelchair ever since. He was offered a prosthesis but couldn’t tolerate the pain and problems that went with it.
 

Harriet had looked after him with loving care and attention throughout her young life, running to fetch whatever he needed and couldn’t reach for himself, reading her favourite
William
stories to him, entertaining him with market gossip and the jokes she collected from her Dandy and Beano comics to make him laugh.

‘Yer a right little tomboy, you,’ he would say, chuckling as she leapt about in a pretend sword fight or galloped round the kitchen on her imaginary horse wearing a Roy Roger’s cowboy hat and gun holster. She’d always liked to hear her dad laugh.

As she got older, Harriet had been the one to cope with his frequent black moods when he was in pain, while her mother did only what duty demanded, devoting herself to her hairdressing business. Joyce argued that if she hadn’t been so hard-working they would all have starved, which Harriet supposed must be true. It just hurt that she’d showed so little compassion or love for the man she’d married.

As a child, Harriet had never understood why her mother always seemed so angry with him, and with her daughter too, as if by association. She’d been aware that she and Joyce were not close, and that her brother Grant, at nineteen older than her by not quite two years, was her favourite. Why that should be Harriet had never understood, assuming that for some reason Joyce preferred boys. Following Nan’s revelation, if what she said was true, then it would explain everything.

Joyce nudged Harriet in the side with a sharp elbow. ‘Get a move on, girl. Show’s over, and I suppose we’ll have to ask folk back for a brew. Did you get any food in like I asked you to?’

‘Yes Mother.’

‘Go on ahead and put t’kettle on. And start cutting them ham sandwiches, I’m fair clemmed.’

Her mother was an attractive woman, still winning admiring, lingering glances from men, for all she was almost forty. But once she opened her mouth she sounded plain rough. Except when she was working in her hair salon, that is, when she put on airs something shocking. It almost made Harriet laugh at times to hear her mam trying to sound posh when they all knew she’d been born and brought up in the Dardanelles, one of the roughest parts of Ancoats.

But Harriet knew better than to argue and quickened her pace to do as she was bid. She’d always hated the fact that her mother seemed to look upon her as little more than a skivvy, useful only to put on the dinner, do the shopping, wash up and generally mind the flat while Joyce herself spent every waking moment either with her customers in the salon, or down at the Dog and Duck with her men friends. And it wasn’t as if Harriet didn’t have better things she could be doing, like learning her short forms and studying for her Pitman’s exams.

Wanting to please her mother, Harriet had agreed to attend secretarial college which Joyce was certain would be the best way for her to secure a good job, but even that wasn’t right. Perversely, she either complained that her daughter never had her head out of a book, or else wasn’t putting in enough effort, depending on her mood on any given day. Even when Harriet had saved up to buy herself a second-hand typewriter she complained about the constant tapping of the keys. Joyce never seemed to stop criticising whatever her daughter did.

Today, if she hurried, Harriet thought she might at least have a few blessed moments alone to mull over her loss before the other mourners arrived, and to think about what she’d just learned on this miserable day. Though perhaps it was best not to think at all.

Oh, if only she’d been told all of this before Dad died, then she could have asked him for a proper explanation. For some reason he’d chosen to keep this fact a secret but she had to know more. Why would he do that to her? Why would he lie? And could she now rely on her mother to tell her the truth? Harriet was determined to drag the whole sorry tale out of her grandmother, since she was the one who had opened up this particular Pandora’s box. She wanted,
needed
, to learn every last detail. Joyce not her mother? Lord, what a mess!

Chapter Two

The day Joyce met Stan Ashton seemed to mark the start of a perfect summer. It was July 1939 and she’d been instantly bowled over by his charm, and by his rugged good looks. She met him quite by chance while she was standing in a queue, the first of many during that long, endless war. Later, Joyce couldn’t even remember what she had been queuing for, sausages perhaps for her dad’s breakfast, but one minute she’d been standing in line, the next she was sprawling in the gutter. Some great bulk of a woman had elbowed her way to the front, sending Joyce flying.

‘Hey, I know I’m irresistible to women, but they don’t usually fall at my feet.’

Heads swivelled to see who this rich male voice belonged to as the young man helped her to her feet. Joyce could see their glances of pure envy as he dusted down her skirt and picked up her shopping basket.

He was smartly dressed, polite, and utterly gorgeous. Just looking into those slate grey eyes made Joyce go all weak at the knees and almost made her collapse again. He was tall, but not too tall. Joyce didn’t care for lean gangly men. Stan was of medium build, broad shouldered, with a shock of red-gold hair and a teasing smile on his freckled face. Warm, easy going, he filled her with a strange, pulsing excitement, as if she knew she’d met her destiny.

Champion Street Market had been humming with activity that morning, as always, women’s heads bobbing anxiously together as they’d discussed the looming spectre of war. People had long since lost faith in any attempt at appeasement made by the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. He appeared now as a rather foolish old man with his rolled up umbrella and bit of paper he thought could solve everything. No one had any doubt that war would come. But not yet, Joyce thought, smiling cheekily at the stranger, please not yet.

It was a summer for love, for dreaming and hoping everything might turn out right after all. The sun never seemed to stop shining and each evening Joyce would dash home from the market where she worked on Molly Poulson’s cheese stall, to meet this handsome young man. They’d walk arm in arm out into a warm, summer’s evening, not caring where they went, with eyes only for each other.

They were young, and naïve, Joyce just turned eighteen and Stan barely a year older. They felt as if they could conquer the world, instead of facing the grumbling warnings of a world war.

He proved to be the perfect gentleman, never trying anything on that he shouldn’t. They kissed a great deal, mainly on the back row at the flicks, and talked endlessly.

He told her all about his family, who lived in Macclesfield. His father ran a wholesale ironmongery business and Joyce got the feeling they were quite comfortably off. This made her nervous and she was reluctant to tell him about her own father, who was a mere dustman, surely the lowest of the low. Joyce had always felt a bit ashamed of her family, living as they did in a pretty rough part of Ancoats. It was a relief for her to escape each day even to Castlefield, which was marginally better. But she had hopes and dreams of a better future. Joyce intended to make something of her life. She avoided the truth by telling him that her dad worked for the council.

As July and August slipped rapidly by, the atmosphere gradually changed. Hitler signed a pact with the Soviet Union and even Neville Chamberlain was saying, ‘We are now confronted with the imminent peril of war.’ Joyce began to feel as if she were on a roller-coaster, one minute high with excitement, the next plunging into an abyss she couldn’t even imagine. The world was falling into dangerous territory and she could do nothing to stop it.

Then one evening as they strolled on the towpath by the Bridgewater Canal, Stan gave her a lingering kiss, holding her tighter than usual in his arms.

‘There’s something I need to tell you.’

Joyce’s heart skipped a beat. Was he going to say that he loved her?

He fidgeted a little then destroyed her dreams with just a few simple words. ‘I’ve volunteered to join the navy.’

‘What?’ In a way she’d been half expecting this, dreading it as mobilisation had already started. But she’d shut the thought out of her head, not caring to face the inevitable. Now she swallowed the ball of fear that tightened her throat. ‘When do you leave?’

‘I’m expecting to be called up for training any day now’

She nodded, too uncertain of him to express all the thoughts that were crowding in her head. Perhaps he was similarly affected for even now he didn’t declare himself. Joyce had thought him to be quite keen, as taken with her as she was of him, yet he didn’t even ask her to write.

It cast a shadow over their last few days together, but did nothing to prevent her from falling head over heels in love. It was far too late anyway to stop that from happening. She’d hoped he might feel the same way.

On September 1,1939, Hitler marched his troops into Poland and two days later war was declared. There was a surge of panic, with people lifting their eyes to the skies as if half expecting it to turn black with German bombers, as Goering had promised.
 

Two days after that Joyce was standing on the platform at London Road Station, saying goodbye. ‘It’s been a great summer,’ Stan said, taking her gently into his arms. ‘You’re a great girl, Joyce, I’m glad I met you.’

‘I’m glad I met you too,’ she told him, going all misty-eyed with unshed tears.

All around them were other young couples weeping and saying their goodbyes. There were women as well as men dressed in khaki and navy blue, some of them looking quite skittish with blonde curls and lipstick, which surely was against regulations. Not that Joyce blamed them for this small show of defiance, they’d need all the courage they could muster where they were going. She felt her own surge of pride to be standing with this handsome young sailor who was holding her so tightly in his arms.

‘I don’t suppose you’ll miss me,’ he jokily remarked, as he stepped away and swung his kitbag on to his shoulder.

‘I don’t suppose I will,’ she jauntily replied, afraid of seeming needy.

She ached for him to tell her that he loved her, to ask her to wait for him, and to write to him every day. He paused, uncertain for a moment, as if he might be about to say something more, but then a rowdy group of laughing sailors suddenly surged all around them.

He had time only to give her one last kiss on the tip of her nose before climbing into a carriage with them. As the train started to move he leant out of the carriage window shouting something to her which might have been, ‘I’ll write,’ but she couldn’t be certain. Then he was steaming out of her life, and far too late Joyce remembered that as she’d never allowed him to come to her home, he didn’t even know her address. She didn’t expect to see or hear from Stan Ashton ever again.

Thinking about that day now, twenty years later, made Joyce’s heart bleed. She and Stan had started out with such high hopes. He an idealistic, eager young man setting off on the adventure of war. She a silly young girl with romance filling her head. They hadn’t the first idea what they were facing. It had all seemed so unreal, like something out of a Hollywood movie. Yet when reality had struck, they’d both sadly come down to earth with a bump.

Now he was dead, praise the Lord, and Joyce did not encourage the mourners to linger. Once everyone was fed, courtesy of her daughter, she made it very clear that she had a more pressing engagement.

‘I must open the salon in time for my three o’clock appointment,’ she informed her guests in her carefully enunciated diction. ‘The lady in question is one of my regulars.’