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Eighteen hours later the child was born, and Aunt Phyllis had been right about the pain. It was a girl with a face the shape of Martin's, and I had no interest in it.

The next night Don Dowling came in roaring drunk and sang and shouted in their front room, and since I was lying in Dad's bed in our front room it was as if he was standing by my side. When Aunt Phyllis came in to see me she made no comment whatever about the oration, and the situation should have appeared weird but I was so weak and dazed that her strange attitude must have seemed simply part of the pattern of this awful, pain-filled thing called living. But when the nurse came in for the night visit she hammered on the wall, shouting, "If you dont cease that noise I'll go and get a policeman."

Aunt Phyllis was in our kitchen when this occurred, and shortly afterwards she went in next door and there was no more noise. Vaguely it occurred to me that she could have stopped it sooner.

It was the first of June, nineteen-forty, a beautiful day, warm and mellow, and the wireless was telling of the evacuation from Dunkirk.

There had been no 'washing hanging on the Seigfried Line' after all. I was standing in the scullery doing the dinner dishes. Outside in the yard, in her pram, lay Constance. Why I had called the child Constance I dont really know, maybe because it expressed my feelings for her father, constant, ever constant, and alongside this love there was growing daily for this child I had not wanted another kind of love.

Now, when I took her in my arms and fed her, I knew I was no longer whole, part of me was in her. She had also brought a feeling of family back into the house;

she had, I knew, eased my father's pain, and his love for her was as deep as, if not deeper than, the love he had for me.

Ronnie paid little attention to her he would glance at her but never spoke to her or talked the baby twaddle that Dad did and which, strangely, I found it impossible to use but to my growing concern he had once again turned his attention to me. He was all forgiveness and solicitude, and this solicitude did more to bring me back into an awareness of life than anything else, because it created in me the old fear. I was now sleeping upstairs again, and each night I dreaded a midnight visit. just to talk.

As I finished the dishes Sam came up the yard and stood by the pram, looking down on the child and touching her with his finger, and he turned and smiled at me through the scullery window. Then coming in, he said, "By, she's bonnie, Christine."

I smiled at him, there was no need for words with Sam.

"Where's Stinker?" he asked.

"I'll take him for a run on the fells."

"I haven't seen him since the middle of the morning, Sam," I replied;

'he should be in for his dinner, he's never this late. "

I was never to see Stinker again. He did not come in all day, and Dad, as he had done once before, searched the fells for him. On the Sunday, remembering where Don had found him in the stables. Dad visited them again, but there was no sign of a dog of any kind, nor had anyone noticed the children playing with a strange dog.

When he brought this news back I began to cry.

"Now, now, lass," he said, 'you know what dogs are, he's gone on the rampage. In about three days he'll show up, tired and hungry. It's the nature of the beast. "

Three days passed and Stinker did not show up, and on Tuesday afternoon a man came to ask if he could see Dad. I told him he was down on the allotment. An hour later Dad came slowly into the scullery, the blue marks on his forehead where the coal had left its design were standing out visibly. He came straight to the point, patting my shoulder and saying "Prepare yourself for a bit of a shock, lass.... Stinker's dead."

"Oh, Dad, no!" I sank down on to a chair and said in a whisper,

"Where?" and then, "How?"

I watched him draw the back of his hand across both sides of his mouth before replying, "He was drowned, lass."

I was on my feet now.

"He couldn't drown. Dad, he was a swimmer, he couldn't drown."

Dad filled his chest with air and let it out slowly before speaking again.

"He was drowned, lass, in a sack filled with bricks."

I closed my eyes, then pressed my palms over them, but it didn't shut out the picture of Stinker in the sack full of bricks. Dad's voice was going on, rising in anger, but I only heard snatches of what he was saying, such as "I'll make the swine pay for this. I'll find out before I die who did the day's work, by God! I will."

Oh! Stinker. Poor Stinker, with his shaggy coat and his warm tongue and his laughing eyes. Oh! Stinker.

I learned later that the man who had come to the door for Dad had seen a man swing a sack into the river. But he was too far away to be recognized except that he was very tall. My mind had sprung to Fitly Gunthorpe again, but when I put this to Dad he said, "Aye, I thought that an' all and I went round there, but Fitty's been evacuated for the last month."

I was deeply affected, not only by Stinker's death but by the way he had died, and day after day I cried about him until Dad, looking into my white face one morning, said firmly, "Now look here, lass, he's gone and he can't be brought back and you've got the hairn to see to, so knuckle to."

He was talking to the mother of Constance, but I did not feel a mother, I felt in this moment a very young girl who had lost her dog.

Stinker hadn't only been a dog, he had been a person to whom in the darkness of the night I had whispered my thoughts, my pain.

All the time I had been carrying the child I had, in a way, been free, free from the pressure of both Ronnie and Don, but now the pressure was back, heavy and menacing. With Ronnie, it was his solicitude, for which at any moment he might ask payment or, what was more likely, plead for payment, for I had unheedingly broken down certain barriers for him: I was no longer a virgin, there was no question of being raped by my brother. With Don, it was the insidious penetration of himself into my life through the wall that separated us. For hours he would sing loudly and practise on a guitar, playing the one tune over and over again. And then every third week, when he was on the day shift, around twelve o'clock at night or at whatever time he returned from the bars, there would start a gentle tapping on the wall. This would last from ten minutes to anything up to an hour. The more tight he was the shorter would be the duration. I began to wait for the tapping, knowing it would come, for I could never go to sleep until it finished.

It took swift payment of my nerves, for at times the soft tap-tap became loud in my head, like a hammer beating on tin, and I felt I must scream at him through the wall or go mad.

Between the two of them, I had good reason for asking Dad to change rooms again, but had I told him the situation I doubt whether he would have believed me. More likely he would have thought my mind was affected. I could not even make Constance the excuse for a change of room, for the child slept anywhere, and she never cried except when she was hungry, and then I had only to lift her from the cot where it was wedged between the wall and the foot of my bed.

And now I was back where I had started, with Don on one side and Ronnie on the other, the only difference being they were no longer boys, they were both men. Of the two, at this time, I think I was mostly afraid of our Ronnie, and this fear came to the surface one Friday night when, after placing his board money on the table, he pushed three pounds towards me, saying, "Get yourself something."

I looked at him, then turned sharply away from the light in his eyes, that soft, pleading light that could turn my stomach. I did not touch the money, but said, "Thanks, but there's nothing I want."

"Dont be silly," he said; 'you're letting yourself go and you're not to do that. Get yourself a frock or something. " He picked the money up and put it on the mantelpiece.

I left the money where it was. And there it remained until Dad came in.

"Whose is this ?" he asked, touching the notes.

"Our Ronnie's," I said, but gave no further information. The next morning the money had gone, and I went down the town and bought a strong bolt and that afternoon I fixed it on my bedroom door.

the night following Constance's second birthday, in March 1942, Fellburn had the heaviest air-raid it had yet experienced. I was alone in the house, both Dad and Ronnie being on the night shift, and at the first sound of the siren I quickly gathered up the things I always kept ready and hurried across the road, with Constance in my arms, and down into the shelter. Dad had rigged up three bunks. Also there was a little oil stove and a cupboard made out of boxes, and if one could have slept without worry the shelter would not have proved a bad alternative to the bedroom.

I had just got Constance settled when from outside the door in the sandbagged passage I heard Sam's voice saying, "You there, Christine?"

I opened the door for him, and he came in making, as usual, an excuse to cover his concern for us.

"Our shelter is already like the morgue.

I hate to be in there by me self I still can't get Mam to use it.

Funny, isn't it, her so frightened and won't go in an air-raid shelter.

She did at first, that's the odd thing. "

I nodded.

"Perhaps she's wise," I said.

"If you've got to go you'll go, air-raid shelter or no."

He turned his head slowly and looked at me in the light of the hurricane lamp, then as slowly turned his gaze down on Constance and, repeating a statement he had made a thousand times before, he said,

"By, she's bonnie, Christine."

At this very moment the earth gave a mighty shudder and we both dropped on to our knees and threw ourselves across Constance. For quite some moments I could feel the trembling, and it seemed to run through me, and Sam, whose head was close to mine, smiled and said, "Coo! a step nearer and it would have taken the skin off our noses."

Then he added, "Look, she's still sleeping."

There came another thud, more distant this time; then within a few seconds another one that seemed to fall softly.

"They're trying for the aerodrome," said Sam.

"What the devil did they want to build an aerodrome up here for anyway?

They should never put dromes near houses." He sounded angry.

I smiled at him and whispered, as if afraid to raise my voice, "But I thought you liked the air force. Weren't you talking of joining up?"

"I like the air force but not that aerodrome. It's too bloomin' near for my fancy. Anyway, when I do join up they'll know about it, for I'll go straight to the Air Marshal and give him a piece of my mind."

And he demonstrated with his finger and thumb how big the piece would be. Then went on, "I'll tell him a thing or two he won't forget before I'm shot."

It wasn't only what Sam said that was funny but the way he said it, and he was always using his dry humour to turn my thoughts from myself.

And he succeeded in his aim once again for, moving from his side, I laid my head on the foot of the bunk for a moment and laughed.

Then looking at him I said, "You are an idiot, Sam." He was looking at Constance and made no comment, but there was a little pleased smile around his lips.

He got to his feet now, saying, "I'll Just look out and see if the street's standin'," and by this I knew he was going to slip across and see if his mother was all right.

As I opened the door for him and watched him ease his thick body and broad shoulders out into the passage I wondered, and not for the first time, what I would have done during the past three years without him.

He was just turned seventeen but he seemed much older, and so wise for a lad. One thing I was certain of, he was the most understanding of those around me, and that included Dad, for his understanding was not born of sorrow like Dad's and there was not a trace of condemnation in it. I'm sure that something within me, never very strong, call it my nerves for want of a better name, would have snapped under the strain of Don's persistent covert persecution and our Ronnie's insidious attempts to penetrate into my inner life, if it hadn't been for Sam.

Ronnie had now placed me in such a position that f could no longer turn on him in a temper, real or simulated, for he i3l

was so kind and patient. so patient. It was this patience that was wearing my nerves to frayed threads. Not the threat of raids and bombing or even Don Dowling's present form of torture, it was Ronnie, and his blatant desire I knew would be the end of me, if not morally, then in some disastrous way, should the situation continue for much longer.

Dad was blissfully unaware of anything wrong and he daily added to my strain by making such suggestions as, "Go on, lass, go to the pictures with Ronnie. The hairn will be all right with me. You worry too much about her." Or, "Go on, let Ronnie go with you for the shopping and carry the things."

One day, getting Dad by himself I said to him, "Dad, I want to go out on my own, I dont want Ronnie or anybody else about me." At this he had said, "All right, lass, have it your own way." But there had been a look of worry in his eyes.

I knew the reason for both the look and his tone. The air force was all around, lorry loads of blue-clad figures passed the door every day.

I wanted to say to him, "Dad, they hold no more interest for me than old Mr. Patterson next door," but I knew he wouldn't believe me. I was nineteen and motherhood had caused me to side-step the unbalanced fat of the teens, and I had quickly developed a figure which brought whistles from the lorries and advances from more than one uniformed male. But it was always the new ones to the drome that made the advances, for it had got around that I was unmarried and had a child, and in some perverse way this seemed to give me a form of protection, at least in the daylight. I never trusted myself out of doors after dark for, as Aunt Phyllis crudely put it, the air force swarmed over the town at night like maggots on meat.

Sometimes lying awake at night I asked myself if I was a complete fool altogether, for I simply could not forget Martin. If I could get him out of my mind then perhaps I would meet some man who would accept Constance and marry me. On this thought I would always toss restlessly and end up by turning my face into the pillow and there see his face emerge through great clouds of multi-coloured mist and the desire for him would rise in me until, unable to bear it any longer, I would get up and pace the narrow length of my room. Or sometimes I would sit at the window for hours on end, wondering about him, where he was, if he was in the army, the navy or the air force, if he had been wounded. I could never think of him as being dead, for my longing told me I should meet him again I must. I was still young enough to imagine that all things are possible to them that hope.