On a Clear Day (6 page)

She climbed back into bed and buried her head under the bedclothes so that no one would hear her cry. It was no use, no use at all. However kind Aunt Polly was, she couldn’t live here with these large figures and their loud voices and all these grey houses. She’d far rather go to the orphanage. At least in the orphanage there’d be other children and she’d have a teddy bear.

When the lady from Dr Barnardo’s had come to school to receive all the money from their collecting boxes, she’d brought pictures of the children to show to them. They looked so happy
playing together in a garden with a swing. They each had a little bed and there were toys and books beside each one.

She made up her mind, came out from under the bedclothes and started to get dressed. She’d just have to explain politely to Auntie Polly that she really couldn’t impose on her kindness and could she take her to the orphanage right away.

Whenever Polly McGillvray looked back on the weeks that followed her sister Ellie’s death, she wondered how she had found the strength to go on during that awful time. In those weeks she came to know a despair that was quite new to her. There were moments when the woman who had always seen herself as easy going and optimistic was shocked to find that she would be only too grateful to join her sister under a mound of flowers.

It was not that Polly expected life to be easy or without grief. From her earliest years she had been well acquainted with both hard work and sudden losses. As the eldest girl in a family of six, with a mother often disabled by illness, she bore much of the burden of running the household. She rose early to light the stove, carried water from the well before she went to school and came home to sweep and scrub the stone floor of the big kitchen where the day to day life of the family went on. In the month of her ninth birthday, her own much-loved grandmother died and later that same summer, her playmate, Dolly, from the farm just down the hill was drowned in a flax hole. Two years later, her baby brother died suddenly when only a few days old to the great
distress of her mother who continued to lament for years because he had not even been baptised.

The Scott family were not poor for her father, Robert, was a skilled craftsman. Although there were several other blacksmiths within a few miles distance, he was never short of work and he willingly toiled all hours for the sake of his young family, but until Ellie and Mary and little Florence were able to help in the house, the burden of keeping the place clean and making sure the younger children were presentable for school was often a full time job for Polly.

Bob and Johnny, her two brothers had an even greater talent than most small boys for tearing their trousers, scraping their boots and arriving home marked with the results of their activities. Long before Polly left school at fourteen to be apprenticed to a dressmaker in Armagh, she was an expert on mending.

In the cramped back premises of the shop in Thomas Street, Polly worked six days a week. The hours were long and wearisome, the pay during her apprenticeship almost non-existent. But Polly always had the capacity to make the best of any situation. It was she who made the other girls laugh when they were presented with yet one more batch of sleeves to make up, a job they all hated, and it was she who suggested dances and parties and picnics on their rare days off.

But any hardship there might have been in her early years was completely forgotten when Polly met Jimmy at a dance in Belfast while she was staying with her aunt on the Lisburn Road.

Jimmy, who was some years older, wanted to go off to Canada and make his fortune and he made it quite clear that he wanted Polly to go with him. At nineteen, she was delighted with the prospect. Polly, who had never been further from home than her annual visit to Belfast, organised her wedding and set out for Canada a few weeks later as if she were going to the Isle of Man for her holidays. She simply assumed she would come home regularly to visit her family as so many Canadians and Americans appeared to do.

Life in Canada in the 1920s was not as easy or as luxurious as the letters of emigrants often made out. Two years after the local band had played to her and Jimmy for the two miles to Armagh station and ranged themselves to play
Will Ye No Come Back Again
on the platform where her family and friends were to say their goodbyes, life in Canada was not as rosy as the picture Polly had painted for herself.

With two babies and a husband who could not always find work despite his skills, the prospect of coming home to visit her parents had receded into the far distance. She was homesick and often short of money, but only the most perceptive of
her new friends would have guessed at either. Polly always managed to stay cheerful and she had the gift of spending a very small amount to create a treat, or some small outing for her family however bad things were. She began sewing at home and the moment Eddie went to school she found a job in a dress shop.

It was only months after they had bought their first modest home on the outskirts of Toronto that the prospect of the coming war forced a difficult decision upon them. They had been in Canada for fourteen years and had never made the return journey to Ulster. Both sets of parents were ageing and Jimmy’s mother was dying of cancer. If they crossed the Atlantic that summer they might not be able to get back again. But if they didn’t go now, with war in sight, they might never see their parents again.

Finally, they decided they would return home. They arrived back in Belfast in August 1939. A month later they opened the newspaper to find that the ship on which they had travelled back had been torpedoed as it made the return journey to Canada.

There was no problem with Jimmy finding work. As a skilled mechanic he was taken on at Shorts immediately. Within days he was assembling parts of the fuselage of the Sunderland flying boats which were to patrol the western approaches.
Finding a house was another matter. Houses were in very short supply in the city and Polly found that living with her McGillvray in-laws was even worse than being homesick. Davy and Eddie were resentful and unsettled and complained continually about the absence of candy and ice-cream parlours. They compared everything in Belfast with what they had left behind in Canada and hadn’t a good word to say for anything.

When the Blitz began it was poor Ronnie who was terrified. Always the quietest and most thoughtful of the three, he became anxious when the first barrage balloons appeared in the sky. Although Polly tried to explain they were there to protect them, Ronnie was oppressed by the great, grey shapes and remained even more anxious about them than about the planes that were soon making raids on the docks, shipyards and aircraft factories.

Night after night Polly lay awake listening, for when Jimmy worked a double shift, he would be at work when the raiders came. She learnt, as everyone in Britain learnt, to fear moonlight, those beautiful clear nights when the raiders could find their targets more easily. But the worst night of all, the one that would remain forever in the minds of those who lived through it, Jimmy was at home, asleep by her side in the new house they had finally acquired.

In the morning they smelt the smoke and the taint of rubber in the air. When they listened to the radio at six o’clock, before the boys were awake and heard the toll of dead and missing, they kissed each other and shed a few tears. Hours later the phone rang and a neighbour of Jimmy’s parents told him that his brother was missing. The police had called on his father and suggested that someone should go down to St George’s Market to see if he was there. That was where the bodies were being laid out for identification.

Jimmy had found his brother’s body, undamaged and unmarked, a victim of blast. By a strange chance he lay beside three of his old school friends whose battered remains had been dug from the rubble of the back-to-back houses down by the docks where Jimmy and his brother had begun their lives. He was looking down at them unable to grasp how four of the five wee lads who kicked a tin can round the street together, should be together once again, when the mother of one of them appeared, bent over and leaning on a stick. Jimmy had stood and wept and the bereaved mother had comforted him.

Although she worried about her family, the war years were not as hard on Polly as they were on many other women. She was practical and cheerful, coped with shortages and rationing better than most and although she seldom got up to
Armagh to see her family, she drew such comfort from knowing that they were there, that they were safe and that she was no longer thousands of miles away.

Disasters it seemed, always struck unexpectedly. One night when Jimmy was cycling to work he was caught by a sudden raid. Before he could find an air-raid shelter, he was knocked out by a lump of flying wood. Lying in the road, lit only by the flickers from burning buildings, a fire engine just managed to avoid his unconscious body at the last minute. That night he escaped death and suffered only a bad headache the next day. He was not so fortunate at the beginning of 1945.

It was with peace already in sight that Jimmy had his accident, as he worked on a plane that might never be needed. No one ever worked out exactly what happened. Jimmy remembered only that his feet went from under him and the next thing he knew he was in hospital. It was likely that engine grease had been the cause of his fall. There shouldn’t have been engine grease on that scaffolding, but if it was there and Jimmy was concentrating on the job as he moved slowly along the fuselage, he certainly wouldn’t have seen it. There was a long argument about compensation which was never resolved. Jimmy was on his back for two months at Musgrave Park Hospital and in too much pain to join in the Victory celebrations.
The doctors admitted that he would seldom be without pain for the rest of his life.

That, Polly decided later, was the beginning of her own bad time. After Jimmy’s accident, life had been understandably harder and Polly felt it more than all the other hard times she had endured. But when Ellie died, it seemed as if this was the final blow. She felt that the loss of the one bright star that had always shone in her sky, even if she seldom had the opportunity to go out and look at it, was the one thing too many. The rest she could bear. She could struggle with dirt and poverty, hard times and fractious children, sudden grief, illness and the misery of pain and weariness, but for Ellie to be taken away was for the light to be shut off. She had no wish whatever to live in the darkness that followed.

Ellie had been the pretty one in the family and she had a sweetness of nature that matched her soft looks. Polly had loved her younger sister more than either of her other sisters or her two brothers. From the moment the news of her death came, it never occurred to her to do anything other than to make a home for Clare, for Clare was dear Ellie’s child and had something about her of her mother, though she was a far more robust and lively child than Ellie had ever been.

She was anxious about separating the two children, but she had guessed that the Hamilton’s
would feel it their duty to care for their grandson and she was grateful when her brother-in-law had told her of their decision. She had always found William a difficult child to love, and while she could imagine being able to treat Clare as her own child, she was honest enough to admit that she was unlikely to manage it with William.

The death of her favourite sister would have been disaster enough for Polly, but that heartbreak came at the end of a long series of other sad and unhappy events in her life. In May of that year, 1946, Jimmy, who had held down the job at the Bakery since the Christmas of 1945, had been listed for an early morning shift. He had protested that there were no buses on his route at that hour, but when his protests were ignored, he’d got out his ancient bicycle and cycled to work. It was only a couple of days before his back played up. The doctor had given him a sick note and the Bakery had given him his cards.

Polly’s relief when Davy got a new and better-paid job only a week later was short-lived. When he brought home his first pay packet, he said he could only afford two pounds a week for his keep because he was now saving up to get married. When Eddie heard that Davy was paying only two pounds a week he wanted to know why he should pay more. He was saving up for a bicycle so that he could look for the better jobs out on
the new industrial estate where there were no buses at all yet.

Only Ronnie, who seemed to take after the more kindly-natured Scotts and not the generally hard-headed McGillvray’s, came to her with his five shillings a week from his paper round and asked if he could give her a hand with anything.

She refused to take his money, knowing full well he needed it to buy the books the school couldn’t afford to provide, but his generous act made it even harder to bear the selfishness of his brothers. For the first time, she saw that the way she had gone on caring for them as they grew up meant that they now simply expected her to do as she had always done. They left a trail of things lying around wherever they went, never did a hand’s turn for themselves and, worst of all, never even thought of doing anything for anyone else.

And Jimmy, for all his good-nature, had dropped into bad habits. There was so much he couldn’t do because of his back that he often didn’t do anything at all. He never even seemed to notice when she was tired or harassed as he’d once done. He’d taken to sitting by the fire in the small back living room reading his newspaper and looking out the window at the abandoned garden which once had been his pride and joy. As often as not Eddie was there too, a pile of magazines by his chair. She had never yet seen him bend to pick
them up when she came into the room to pull the table out for a meal. He never even moved to help her when she opened up the settee at night and tramped back upstairs to carry down the heavy pile of bedding which had to be stored in a corner of Ronnie’s room during the day.

The hardest part for Polly was that she knew it was her own fault. Long ago, in the letters she had written so faithfully to her, week by week, when she was in Canada, Ellie had said that she did too much for the boys. Ellie had been right. It was one thing doing your best for your family but she should have made them do more for themselves and more to help her, especially when she was working as well. Now Davy and Eddie would be looking for a wife who would do just what she had done and wait on them hand and foot.

With no help from anyone except Ronnie, the struggle to keep the place decent was a daily battle and now, on top of everything, she began to suffer hot flushes both day and night. Often she got little sleep. Weary of lying in the dark trying not to twist and turn and wake Jimmy, she’d get up and clean the kitchen or do the ironing. Sometimes she would even go upstairs to the tiny third bedroom that overlooked the road and hand finish a hem by the light of the lamp built-in to her electric sewing machine.

With her husband and sons asleep all around
her, she often felt quite desolate. Those were the times she always sought comfort by thinking of Ellie, wondering when they could manage to see each other again, making some plan to save a few shillings each week so she could afford the train fare to Armagh.