A Sixpenny Christmas (2 page)

Rhys hurried across to draw back the curtains so that he could see what was happening in the yard outside, and saw with real dismay that the corrugated iron roof on the pigsty was flapping up and down in a manner that boded ill for the occupants. Rhys hesitated. He dared not leave the baby whilst he ran into the yard and tried to secure the roof, but he could not take the child out with him, for the storm, far from easing, seemed to get wilder with every moment and the sleet and the cold were intense. He was fond of the pigs but they would simply have to take their chance, along with the rest of the stock, most of which was out on the hillside. He and Chris had better simply sit in the kitchen and wait for the storm to pass over.

He scooped up his son and went down to the kitchen, sat in one of the well-cushioned and comfortable basket chairs and watched quite enviously as Chris’s thumb slid into his mouth and his eyelids drooped. Wish I could sleep, he thought, but the noise of the storm alone would have kept him awake even had he not been worrying over Molly.

The roof of the pigsty, which had been crashing at regular intervals, was suddenly silent. Rhys heard what he thought was a frightened grunt, but then the thunder roared again and through the closed window he could see the lightning, bright as day as it stabbed to earth. In the lull which followed the last crash, Rhys heard Feather,
the mother of his two other sheepdogs, barking outside. He got carefully to his feet, still holding Chris in the crook of his arm, and opened the back door. The dogs tumbled in, wide-eyed, ears a-prick, seeming to say that it was about time someone remembered them. They crowded round Rhys as though anxious for an explanation, but he could only ruffle their heads and soothe them with promises that it would soon be over and everyone would be able to sleep.

But the storm raged on and Rhys began to fear for the trees which protected the cottage and for the hay in its ancient Dutch barn. Then there were the horses in the stable, for though a good deal of his work on the farm involved the ancient tractor, on the steep hillsides horses were essential. They had two, Guinness and Porter, as well as Cherry the pony, and all three were as liable as any other of their kind to take fright at loud unexpected noises or movements. Rhys thanked his stars that he had decided to bring them in tonight, for the stable building was old and solid, built of stone and roofed with shingles.

Thinking of the work he would have to do to repair the storm damage brought Rhys’s mind full circle, back to Molly, who would normally have helped him but now was fighting her own battle – one in which he could no more help her than she could help him in his.

Rhys sighed and looked longingly at the kettle. The fire in the range had been out for days and rather than relighting it he had been heating water, Chris’s food and anything else which needed cooking on their small Primus stove. Molly, good little wife that she was, had cooked soups, pies and loaves of bread before she had left for the city; Rhys just hoped these would last until
she came home again, for his own abilities as a cook were small: he could boil an egg and heat some milk and that was about it. Now he was old enough Molly fed Chris on what they ate themselves. When he was a baby she had pressed his food through a fine wire sieve; Rhys had once eaten a crafty teaspoonful of the mixture and had nearly thrown up. How could good food, when you ate it from your plate, become disgusting pap when pressed through a wire sieve? But Chris had appeared to notice nothing amiss. He was a bright little boy who had walked before he was a year old and now, at two and a half, chattered away to anyone who would listen. Rhys looked fondly down on his sleeping son and wondered whether he should try to put him back in his own small bed, but the warm little body was a comfort and anyway should the child wake again he might feel himself abandoned and begin to wail once more.

Rhys got stealthily to his feet, but did not return to the bedroom. He would lie down on the comfy old-fashioned sofa in the parlour and try to snatch an hour or so of sleep before it was time to get up and begin his daily tasks. Most parlours were rarely used but Molly had furnished theirs with care, saying that she wanted comfort more than a lot of fancy furniture. She liked them to use the parlour on weekday evenings as well as Sundays, and when she was pregnant she had her midday rest on the comfortable sofa. Settling himself with the sleeping child still in his arms, Rhys jumped and swore softly beneath his breath when lightning lit up the room again and a gust of wind blew into the room, presumably from under the kitchen door, wrenching the parlour curtains apart. But by now Rhys was truly sleepy and
settled down with his head on one of the beautiful cushions which Molly had made and stuffed with their own goose feathers.

Lying curled round the baby, he remembered suddenly how Molly hated storms, reminding her as they did of the May blitz which had destroyed half her home town of Liverpool. He told himself that the storm was a local one, caused by the great mountains of Snowdonia, and would not affect his wife in her comfortable bed at the maternity hospital. Smiling, he thought it fortunate that she was not here to be cast into misery and fear by the cracks of thunder and the lightning which either lit up the whole sky or stabbed to earth, causing damage to both buildings and animals. He must remember to tell her about the dreadful storm she had missed, the fearful wind which was even now blowing snow under the kitchen door, and Chris’s bravery in the face of all the noise and confusion.

He lay quietly for a little while, telling himself that he should get up off the sofa and pull the curtains closed again, but sleep was too urgent now and soon the storm raged unheard as Rhys and his little son slumbered.

Molly lay on the delivery couch, feeling the beautiful peace that comes after the struggle to give birth. The nurse who had held her hand and encouraged her throughout the whole business came over to her, a green-wrapped bundle in the crook of her arm. ‘There you are, Mrs Roberts, your beautiful little girl; want to hold her?’

‘Oh, yes please,’ Molly said eagerly, holding out her arms, but though the nurse smiled she shook her head.

‘She’s a fine healthy girl, my dear; she weighed in at
eight pounds four ounces, so just you lie back and I’ll put her against your shoulder . . .’

Molly was preparing to curl an arm round the baby when there was a tremendous crash, which made both the new mother and the nurse jump convulsively and caused the baby to give an indignant hiccup. The nurse laughed and began to speak but she had scarcely got more than a couple of words out when the thunder roared again and the night, which had seemed calm, was suddenly calm no longer. Outside, the wind howled and shrieked, the thunder rumbled and cracked and lightning lit up the long windows of the delivery room. Molly was about to say that she would take the baby now when, abruptly, the room was plunged into inky blackness. Molly and the nurse shrieked again and through the long window Molly saw only Stygian blackness: the lightning had caused a massive power cut.

Someone came hurrying across the delivery room, a dark figure which could have been a man or a woman, until more lightning shivered across the sky – sheet lightning this time – and lit the scene with an unearthly violet glow long enough for Molly to see it was a woman; a sister. The newcomer tapped the nurse on the shoulder. ‘Mrs Roberts and Baby had best get back to the ward now. A porter is outside with a wheelchair for the mother, who is to go to room eight. You take the baby straight to nursery eight and make sure she’s labelled.’ She patted Molly’s shoulder and probably smiled, though Molly could not see her face. ‘The nursery is adjacent to your ward, and for the first couple of days the baby will be brought to you at feeding times.’ She addressed the nurse once more. ‘See if you can rustle up a cup of . . . oh my
God!’ The nurse gave a nervous laugh but Molly, who was terrified of lightning, found nothing amusing in Sister’s squeak of fright. She could not remember a worse storm, and as another nurse helped her off the delivery couch and into the waiting wheelchair she had hard work to suppress her own fear. She had only caught one glimpse of her baby’s small crumpled face, still red with the strain of birth and wet from its recent cleansing, but she thought that the infant was bound to be pretty, for was she not Chris’s sister? He had been a delightful baby, despite her protracted labour, and this little one had popped into the world after only half a dozen hours. It had taken baby Chris a whole week to recover from his experience; this child should be pink and white and beautiful in no time.

Whatever the lightning had done to the electricity supply, it seemed it could not easily be undone. The porter produced a torch, and as he pushed her wheelchair along the corridors he told her that she was fortunate indeed to have given birth before what he guessed was half the city had lost all their electric power. ‘It’ll be chaos tomorrer; perishin’ chaos,’ he said with a sort of ghoulish cheerfulness. ‘As bad as the bleedin’ blitz in ’41, blinkin’ near. Someone’s in the operating theatre right now havin’ what they calls a caesar-een and all the instruments and stuff is down. The lifts is out too, but you’re one of the lucky ones, ’cos rooms seven and eight are on this floor so I shan’t have to try and carry you up the stairs in me strong and manly arms.’

‘Oh, good,’ Molly said faintly. If it isn’t just my luck to get a porter who fancies himself as a comedian, she thought. I know for a fact that this is a single-storey
hospital and the upstairs is just administrative offices. But it would not do to say so, of course; the man was only trying to amuse her, and to take her mind off the uncanny darkness through which he was wheeling her and the occasional stabs of brilliant lightning, to say nothing of the thunder which, though it occasionally seemed more distant, only redoubled its force on its return.

The porter swung her through a pair of doors and into a ward, shining his torch ahead of him, and in its light Molly saw another mum, probably just as tired – and as pleased – as she was herself. Then the wheelchair stopped and the porter shouted to the nurse to come over and give a hand, and very soon Molly found herself between the sheets. She realised as she turned her head into the pillow how very tired she was, and would have slept instantly had a voice not addressed her from the adjacent bed.

‘Hey, missus! Did you have a gal or a boy?’ The woman giggled. ‘Wharra Christmas present, eh? Bet your ole feller’s over the perishin’ moon!’

Molly smiled at all she could see of the other woman, which was the pale disc of her face. ‘You’re right there! A sixpenny Christmas we told each other this one ’ud be, ’cos money’s scarce. But my little girl is worth a lot more than that to me!’

Her companion looked puzzled. ‘A sixpenny Christmas? I ain’t never heard of that before,’ she remarked. ‘What does it mean, eh?’

Molly laughed. ‘It’s plain you never served in the forces,’ she said. ‘I was in the WAAF and there were more than a dozen girls in my hut. If we’d had to
exchange gifts with all our friends we’d have been broke for a twelvemonth. Instead, each girl bought something worth no more than sixpence, wrapped it, and put it in a big box, and on Christmas morning everyone took a parcel from the box. They were only little things, but somehow just getting a present started the day off well, even if it was only sixpennyworth of chewing gum, or a length of hair ribbon. See?’

The other woman nodded vigorously. ‘Wharra grand idea. Well, it looks like you won’t be the only one havin’ a sixpenny Christmas this year. But what does that matter? We’ve both got daughters. I allus wanted a daughter; eh, come to that I allus wanted a baby so I s’pose it didn’t much matter if it were a boy or a girl. I’m gonna call mine suffin’ real fancy – what’s you gonna call yours? Who’s you, by the way? I’m Ellen O’Mara.’

‘I’m Molly Roberts,’ Molly said wearily. Trust me to get landed with someone who wants to talk when I’m so dreadfully tired, she thought. But she could hear the excitement in the other woman’s voice and answered patiently. ‘I’ll – I’ll think about a name tomorrow.’ And with that, despite the dark, and the noise of the storm, she fell at last into a deep sleep.

Ellen had been prepared for a long and arduous labour, for it is no small thing to have your first child when you are past the age of forty. Her mother had warned her that she would likely have a hard time, and so had various aunts and cousins, but Ellen had just smiled happily and told them that to have a baby of her own would be worth a bit of pain.

And then what had happened? She had been wheeled
into one of the delivery rooms at just about the moment when the storm had come roaring down from the mountains of Wales, charged across the Mersey, and descended upon Liverpool. Ellen was not afraid of much, but she had never come to terms with thunderstorms. Her grandmother had once scared the life out of her with a story about her own father, who had been a farm labourer and had been struck by lightning as he ran for shelter from the heavy rain. ‘It did suffin’ to his poor brain,’ her grandmother had said impressively. ‘He were never the same again, weren’t my poor old dad.’

So naturally enough as soon as the thunder began to rumble Ellen’s thoughts, which had been upon the task in hand – delivery of her first child – wandered out of the hospital and into the outside world. She saw in her mind’s eye lightning zigzagging across the river and down on to the docks where her husband worked, though obviously he wouldn’t be there at this time of night. He ought to be longing for news, striding up and down the waiting room like any other expectant father, but knowing him as she did Ellen suspected that he would be in a pub somewhere, never giving her a thought.

Sam was not a good husband. He was a docker and quicker with a punch than a kiss; in fact Ellen could not remember him showing her a single mark of affection in all their married life. Of course it was her own fault in a way; she should have left him years ago, when he first took a liking to using his fists on her, but he earned a good wage and handed over the housekeeping each week, and though he would occasionally take her small earnings to fund his insatiable thirst she could not accuse him of meanness. The fact was, Ellen was lazy, and
though she knew Sam had no affection for her she also knew that if she left him he would pay her back for her desertion. Her mother thought her a fool to put up with such treatment, but Ellen and Sam had stayed together – so far.