Trinidad Street (59 page)

Behind the bar at the Rum Puncheon, Alma had to keep up a cheerful face. Pulling pints, cleaning glasses, joking with the customers, Alma was the picture of a jolly barmaid. Before she had been there two weeks, Percy Goodhew, the landlord, hardly knew what he used to do without her.

‘Life and soul of the place, that’s what you are, Alma,’ he told her.

‘Job after my own heart, this is,’ she responded.

What she never told him was how desperately hard it was to drag herself out of bed each day and face the world. It was only the thought that she had to get to work that got her on her feet at all. Now, far too late, she had a glimmer of understanding for how her sister had felt. It was almost as bad as a death, having her Charlie put inside. To the last he protested his innocence, saying he’d been framed. Alma believed him, but no one else did, not even the rest of the family. That really hurt, to have Gerry doubt his own brother.

He had it coming to him, Mum.
Those were Gerry’s words. Alma could not put them out of her mind. He was wrong, of course. She was sure he was wrong. Somebody had been out to get her Charlie. It was that crowd he went around with. How she wished he was friends with the boys in the street, the boys he went to school with, just like everyone else. She could hardly bear to think of him locked away inside Wormwood Scrubs. It wrung her heart.

So every evening she left the house with something like relief. It was far too quiet at home, even with Ellen and the two little ones about. She stayed in bed for most of the morning, but there was still the afternoon to get through and, try as she might to distract herself with chores or playing with the children, she could not get away from the
space that Charlie had left. She wished that Percy would take her on for more hours, but the pub was quiet during the day and he could manage by himself then. It was only in the evenings that he needed Alma there as well.

Once there, she was all right. She had to look bright and lively, and after a while she began believing in her own act. She was happier, too, amongst the men. Women were tolerated in the pub, and even welcomed at weekends, as long as they were with their menfolk, but during the week it was a male retreat, an escape from the rigours of home. The men would come in after a hard day at work, ready to relax.

‘’Evening, Alma,’ they would call out as they came through the door. ‘Nice to see a smiling face. Blimey, I wish my old woman’d smile like that when she sees me.’

And Alma would tease them and ask after their work or their chickens or their rabbits or even their children. She had known them all for years and could home in on just the right interest.

All the gossip was chewed over in the bar. They might accuse the women of gossiping, but Alma knew that they were just as bad. They simply thought what they were doing was putting the world to rights. Alma, leaning on the bar with her magnificent bosom straining against her blouse, encouraged confidences.

‘And how’s the world treating you?’ she asked Will, who was staring into his beer with an expression of settled gloom. ‘You look like a month o’ wet Sundays, you do.’

‘So’d you if you had so many blooming kids.’

Alma thought he was lucky. ‘Blooming kids? Get away. Lovely little darlings, your lot. Four boys and two girls! Proved y’self there all right, ain’t you? Plenty of lead in your pencil.’

Predictably, Will brightened up at this. He gave a silly smile.

‘Yeah, well, you could say so.’

‘How’s your little Billy? Better now, is he?’

The youngest of Will and Maisie’s brood had been sickly from birth, but had somehow held on to life.

‘No, he’s poorly again. Crying and that. Came out to get away from it. And now she tells me she’s having another!’

Alma’s heart went out to poor Maisie, but it was no use trying to get Will to see it from her point of view. That wasn’t what the men came in for. She changed the topic of conversation.

‘How’s your dad? I ain’t seen him in here for days.’

‘He’s out on union business all the time now, committee meetings, that sort of thing.’

‘Well, he always was keen on it, weren’t he?’

‘Yeah. Wants me to join him. Set his heart on it, he has. Keeps on at me all the time, how I ought to be helping the cause, and if we all pull together we’ll win through. I been hearing it for years, ever since I was a nipper, but he don’t seem to have won through yet. Still, I might go along with him a bit. Makes a change, like. And it gets me away from
her
.’

The way he spoke, Alma thought, anyone would suppose Maisie was one of those nagging wives and Will a poor little henpecked husband, when nothing could be further from the truth. Will always did exactly what he wanted and left Maisie to get on with it.

‘Your dad’d be pleased, anyway,’ she said.

A discussion of the Lions’ performance last season was breaking up, and one of the Croft men came over to have the glasses refilled.

‘They’ll have to do a bit better than that if they want me there next winter watching ’em,’ he said over his shoulder, and to Alma, ‘Same again, love.’

‘Them Jennings next door to you are moving, are they?’ Alma asked as she pulled the pints.

‘Yeah. In a poor way, they are. Going back to his missus’ family. Pity. They was all right, them Jennings. Never know who you’re going to get in, do you? I asked our Jimmy if him and Florrie’d take it, but he can’t afford to, and anyway Florrie’s got her family to look after an’ all.’

‘Young Florrie’s doing a good job over there,’ Alma said.

‘You’re right there. She’s a nice girl, Florrie. Our Jimmy picked the right one there. But it’s all change, ain’t it? The Jennings and the O’Malleys both going. Best to keep the street the way it is, I always say. Don’t want any bad ’uns getting in here.’

Pat and Declan O’Donaghue came in and bought pints.

‘Here’s two more looking like the cares of the world are on their shoulders,’ Alma said.

‘Been having a family meeting,’ Pat confided.

‘Nothing wrong, I hope?’ Alma was all attention.

‘No, no.’

‘It’s Siobhan.’

They both spoke together. Pat dug his brother sharply in the ribs.

‘Hold your tongue.’

‘It’s all very well for you,’ Declan retorted. ‘My Maureen can’t stand her.’

‘Your family’s still in touch with her, then?’ Alma asked.

‘Oh yeah. Family’s family, when all’s said and done,’ Pat said.

‘We ain’t seen her down here since – oh well, it must’ve been Florrie and Jimmy’s wedding.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Bit of a problem then, is there?’ Alma asked hopefully.

A full-scale O’Donaghue family meeting sounded interesting. Something must be up. But however she put the questions, Pat and Declan were saying no more. In the end she had to give up.

‘We doing anything for this here coronation?’ somebody asked.

‘We had a rare old knees-up for the old king when he was crowned,’ Alma said, smiling in reminiscence. Now
that
had been a party.

‘If we was going to do something, we ought to’ve got it going by now,’ one of the Crofts pointed out.

Somehow, there had not been the general will this time around, and nobody had come forward to get things organized. The gathering tension in the port distracted them.

‘I can always get a few barrels of coronation special in. We can have a do up here,’ Percy suggested.

It seemed like the best idea.

Being a weekday night, the men were on their way by half-past ten. Alma and Percy cleared the tables and swept up. Percy counted the takings. Alma watched him out of the corner of her eyes. He seemed satisfied, giving a little grunt of approval when he got to the final total.

‘Not doing bad, are we?’ she said. ‘Work’s good at the moment. Be better still come the summer, when people are on overtime. They’ll all be up here spending it. Coronation’ll be good for business and all.’

Percy’s broad face broke into its ready grin. ‘Yeah, nothing like a good celebration to bring on a thirst, eh?’

Alma smiled in response. Perhaps when custom was up, he’d take her on for more hours. It would make all the difference to her life.

He was a cheerful cove, Percy, always willing to look on the bright side. He leant on the bar counter, weighing the small bag of takings in his great beefy hand. An ex-Navy man, he had a chest as big as the barrels he heaved so effortlessly about the cellar, and an amazing art gallery of tattoos up his hairy arms. Alma often wondered if he had them over the rest of his body as well.

‘Anyway, you don’t have to worry, Alma old girl. I won’t be giving you the push, even if things get slow. Best asset I got in this place, you are.’

Alma laughed. ‘Get away with you. I bet you say that to all the barmaids.’

Percy shook his head. ‘No – useless, some of ’em. What a place like this really needs is a man and his missus running it. That was how it was done before I come here, weren’t it?’

There was enough of the old Alma still in her to rise to this and tease him. Percy was a bachelor who claimed to have a girl waiting for him in every port and children of every colour under the sun. Alma spun it out, unwilling to leave the warmth of the pub for the emptiness of home.

But eventually she had to put on her jacket and go out into the dark street. She tried to hold on to the jollity of the evening, going over the conversations, remembering the coronation party. She passed the two houses that were soon to be empty and wondered who would come along to take them. But try as she might, as soon as she opened her own front door the greyness swallowed her up. Even though she knew Gerry and Ellen and the nippers were in their beds in the back bedroom, it was not enough, for there right in front of her was the put-you-up that Charlie used to sleep on. She stood staring down at it. Her poor boy, locked away in a cold cell in the Scrubs. She counted the days till he would be home again.

The street sweltered in the June sunshine. It was late morning, a quiet time of day. The young women and the men had all gone off to work, the children were at school, the early-morning step-and-sill scrubbing was long over. The mothers were mostly indoors, preparing the midday dinners. Only at the Irish end was there any life. A chair-mender was sitting at the kerb, weaving a new seat for a kitchen chair out of split canes. The owner of the chair stood nearby, arms folded over her aproned stomach, seeing that it was done as she wanted it. A couple of her neighbours had come out to keep her company and a collection of toddlers and children too young for school gathered to see what sort of entertainment this might turn out to be. For a while they stood in a semicircle, solemnly staring as the dextrous fingers crossed and recrossed the gaping hole, conjuring a pattern. But it palled after a while. It was slow and tedious compared with the rag-and-bone man or the knife-grinder. A couple of them began to dabble in the bucket of water that was keeping the lengths of cane damp. The mender growled at them and the women slapped their hands. (It did not matter whose children they were. They all had the same standards when it came to bringing them up, and anyone was free to correct a neighbour’s offspring as if they were her own.) The little ones were beginning to drift away, or scratch around between the cobbles for
pebbles to play with, when their attention was arrested by a large van turning the corner into the street. With a whoop, the oldest ones ran off to get a better look.

The women looked up as well. Anything coming down Trinidad Street was worth checking up on, but this was quite out of the ordinary: a smartly turned-out covered van drawn by two horses, with a driver and his mate up on the box, and on the side, in large brown and gold letters on a green background,
JAS. BROWN AND SONS, REMOVALS
.

‘Will you be looking at that, then!’

‘Did you ever see the like?’

‘Removals, indeed. Never seen nothing like it in my life. Not round here. Not in Trinidad Street.’

‘Pony and cart’s always been good enough for us.’

They stared in jealous disapproval.

‘Where might that be stopping, might I ask?’

‘Has to be the O’Malleys’ old place.’

‘I never heard it was taken. Did you?’

‘Not a word. Been no one look at it, neither.’

All along the road, doors opened and curious heads poked out. By the time the van stopped outside the empty house, half the daytime inhabitants of the street were outside taking a look.

More treats were in store. Dinners were left unattended as the two men opened the rear doors and began unloading the furniture.

Young Jessica Billingham left her little brother standing on the pavement and ran back to tell her mother.

‘Mum! Mum, come and look! There’s things going into the house!’

Ellen wiped her hands on her apron and followed her excited daughter, rolling slightly as she walked with the bulk of the full-term baby.

‘What is it, lovey? My God! Who on earth is this come to live here, Lord and Lady Muck?’

Jessica ran back to see what was going to happen next, while Ellen joined the small group of women at their end of the street. There was plenty to comment on. Out of the van came a procession of furniture; not just the essentials of life like beds and tables, but amazing things such as rolled-up carpet squares, two frilly easy chairs and a table lamp.

‘I ain’t never seen nothing like it since I had that cleaning job up the minister’s house,’ one woman said.

Alma appeared, hastily dressed, her hair all anyhow.

‘I saw it from the bedroom window. Who is it? Anyone know?’

‘That’s what we all want to know,’ Ellen said.

Tea chests were being lugged into the house now.

‘Tea chests? They setting up a shop, d’you think?’

The woman who had worked for the minister aired her knowledge. ‘That’s what all the crocks and cutlery and stuff is in. All wrapped up in newspaper so’s they won’t break.’

‘What, three chestsful?’ Ellen asked. ‘Who’d use that much?’

‘Some for every day and some for best. Some just for show, like.’

An awed silence fell for fully a minute while they contemplated such riches. Ellen had no utensils of her own at the moment, not a knife or a saucepan. Everything had been pawned or sold, so that she relied on Alma’s small resources. True, much of Alma’s stuff had come from Gerry in the first place, but it was not the same.