Angel of the North (11 page)

‘I’m not surprised. You’ve had a lot on your plate this past month, lass,’ George’s mother sympathized.

The crowd of mourners followed Marie into the house. The front room was packed to suffocation with ten people, and the middle room was the same. People began spilling over into the kitchen and
sitting on the staircase, so there was no room for all their coats and baggage.

‘If you’ll take your coats and everything upstairs and put them on the bed in the front bedroom, they’ll be out of the way,’ she said. ‘We’ll have a bit of
room to manoeuvre.’

Uncle Alfred handed his coat to his wife, Dorothy – Auntie Dot – and edged his way into the front room to stir the fire into life, warm his backside, and start his familiar style of
genial pontificating, a habit Marie well remembered from her childhood. This time the pontificating was about the war. She left him to it and went through to the kitchen to put three kettles on the
stove, two of them borrowed from neighbours. They had also swelled the supply of crockery sufficiently to go round, but the piles of sandwiches didn’t look quite as high as Marie had thought.
She opened the salmon and started making more, until a neighbour relieved her of the task so that she could join her guests. The family had congregated in the front room with Aunt Edie and George,
the rest of the neighbours occupied the dining room. By the time Marie joined the party in the front room Uncle Alfred had given them the solution to the problem of Adolf Hitler.

‘I’m going to write to the War Office people and tell them to put you in charge, Uncle,’ she teased. ‘We’ll have the war done and dusted in a fortnight.’

‘That’s just what your dad would have said. Our Alf, setting the world to rights again,’ Uncle Alfred said. The recollection brought a tear to the corner of his eye, which he
surreptitiously brushed away with the back of his hand before pulling a handkerchief out of his pocket, to give his nose a good blow. ‘Aye, but we’ve had some fun in this house in the
old days, lass. I’ll never forget the parties your mam and dad used to have on New Year’s Eve. You remember some of the games we played? I’ve laughed till my sides ached, in this
house. Poor old Bert. Poor old lad.’

‘He was a great practical joker,’ Auntie Ellen said, after a moment or two of solemn silence. ‘Do you remember that game where he used to have us blindfolded, feeling things,
and guessing what they were? Do you remember when he put that raw sausage and some warm water in the chamber pot, and made me put my hand in it and tell everybody what it was? My God! I nearly
died!’

‘We all nearly died – of laughing,’ Uncle Alf said, as the whole room erupted into mirth. ‘It’s a pity we don’t get together more often. We’ve always
got on.’

‘If you thought that, why’d you move out to Dunswell?’ demanded Aunt Lucy, who had lived in Anlaby for the past ten years with her husband and family.

‘You know why. We wanted the smallholding,’ Alfred said. ‘Same as you wanted that little shop you got in Anlaby.’

Auntie Dot looked up. ‘Pity we had to get together at all for something like this. I got the shock of my life when we got Marie’s letter,’ she said.

‘Our Bert. I still can’t believe it,’ said Aunt Lucy. ‘My baby brother, gone.’

Marie had been wondering how to drop her bombshell about Alfie, and here was the perfect opening. ‘My baby brother gone, as well,’ she said. ‘We sent him away to keep him safe
from the bombing, and now he’s gone missing. I can hardly believe that, either.’

All eyes turned towards her. Auntie Dot gaped. ‘What, our Alfie?’

‘What do you mean?’ Auntie Ellen demanded. ‘Gone where? Not killed, surely!’

‘I certainly hope not killed. Only our Alfie wasn’t happy where he was, and now he’s just vanished. Nobody seems to have seen him for the past two days. I told the police
yesterday, and I rang them again this morning. They’re going to contact me when they’ve “had time to look into the matter.” ’

‘Oh, that’s good of ’em!’ Ellen’s husband, Jack, exclaimed. ‘And when might they manage to find the time, do they think? Do they need a squib up their arses?
They’ll get one if they don’t sharpen up.’

‘He’ll be trying to make his way home. Bet you,’ said Alfred. ‘Bet you anything you like.’

‘He’ll turn up, I’m sure. Leave it at least a week before you start worrying, Marie,’ George soothed her. ‘He’s probably hiding out with some school friend or
other in Bourne. You know what lads are like, always up to some prank. He’ll be somewhere. He’ll be all right. Don’t fret.’

‘That’s the kettle,’ Marie said, and took refuge in the kitchen.

Ellen followed her. ‘My old neighbour’s just flitted down to Lincoln. We’ve known each other years, and I was sorry to lose her. Her new husband’s in the police there. As
soon as we get back, I’ll write to her, and see if he can get things moving.’

Marie stood sloshing milk into china cups, feeling her nerves beginning to crack. She paused. ‘Thanks, Aunt Ellen. I know it sounds far-fetched, and I’m probably imagining things,
but I’ve got a real bad feeling about the people our Alfie’s been staying with. I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could spit; the story they’re telling just doesn’t
add up. When I looked at my dad’s coffin in the church, I really wondered whether they’ve seen our Alfie off to the same place. You know, the next world.’

‘You don’t really think that, do you? I mean, not really.’

‘I’m beginning to wonder. Will you take some of this food in? I’ll bring the tea.’

‘I’ll write to my friend in Lincoln the minute I get home,’ Ellen promised.

‘Keep your eye on the time, Harry,’ Aunt Lucy said, draining her cup. ‘We don’t want to miss the last bus back to Anlaby.’

‘You could keep your own eye on the time if you wanted to. Why do you always leave everything to me?’

‘I don’t leave everything to you.’

‘Don’t worry about the bus,’ said Marie. ‘There’s plenty of beds here. I’m the only one left, now.’

‘I don’t know as I’d want to stay here, and risk being caught in an air raid,’ Aunt Lucy said. ‘What a to-do. Your dad dead, your mother in hospital, and now Alfie
missing. I never heard of a family having such bad luck.’

‘You hear of plenty of them round here. We get them at the hospital all the time.’

‘He was a wonderful feller, your dad,’ Aunt Edie said. ‘He could turn his hand to anything. Any mortal thing. My husband thought the world of him. He used to say he was the
best little bloke in the world.’

Uncle Alfred swallowed a mouthful of tea. ‘He used to be a dab hand at wine making. Some o’ them parties him and your mam used to have . . . I don’t suppose there’s any
handy?’

‘What – parties?’

‘Wine, you daft ha’porth.’

Marie rolled her eyes and tilted her chin in the direction of her neighbours in the dining room. ‘Not enough to go round,’ she said.

‘Meaning there will be enough when the company thins out a bit?’

‘If it thins out enough before you have to go for the bus, there will.’

All the coats had gone from the double bed with the exception of Alfred and Dot’s. Having opted to risk an air raid rather than curtail the wine-tasting they went tipsily
up the stairs, to sleep in the front bedroom. A couple of minutes later Marie heard a blood-curdling shriek, and dashed out of the kitchen in time to see Auntie Dot come tumbling down the stairs,
white as a sheet and suddenly sober.

‘Oh dear,’ she said, clutching at her heart as she fell into Marie’s arms. ‘Oh dear me! There’s something there.’

‘Something where?’

‘Little bedroom,’ Auntie Dot shuddered. ‘I didn’t like to go poking about in your mother’s wardrobe so I went to lay our clothes on the bed in there, and something
moved . . . ugh, ugh, ugh!’ She shook herself from head to foot.

‘Well, I’ll be . . .’ she heard Uncle Alfred exclaim. With no trace of horror in his voice he called, ‘Marie, come up here.’

She found him in the smallest bedroom. There in the bed, filthy, fully dressed, and sound asleep with a half-eaten baked ham sandwich in his grimy hand, lay Alfie.

Uncle Alfred began to laugh. Alfie didn’t stir.

‘What are you laughing at?’ Auntie Dot called.

‘Come and see, Dottie.’

Marie greeted her with a broad smile. ‘There’s your “something”.’

‘Oh, my goodness! Well, thank heaven for that.’

‘He’ll cop it tomorrow, the little so-and-so. I’ll skin him for what he’s put me through,’ Marie said, and went downstairs with a lighter heart to finish tidying up
and lock the doors.

So ended the day she buried her father. He was gone, and all the talk about ‘just like old times’ only served to underline the fact that the old times were gone with him. Nothing
would ever be the same. There would be no more of his practical jokes on New Year’s Eve, no more of his allotment veg, his potted meats and pressed tongues, no more rabbit stew, no more
home-made wine, no more Dad. The last he’d used to cobble their boots and shoes on stood propping the dining-room door open. The Great War had taken his leg and ruined his lungs, this second
war had taken his life, and now her father’s troubles were over.

But Alfie was home and safe, and Marie could feel nothing but overwhelming relief.

‘I never touched her cat,’ Alfie told them the following morning, as they breakfasted on toast and jam, and weak tea. ‘I never laid a finger on it. It was
Ernie tied that tin can to its tail, and he was laughing when it was jumping round the yard, going mad trying to shake it off. He thought it was real funny, then as soon as he sees his mother
coming back from the shops, he stops laughing, and he says: “You’re in trouble, boy, for doing that to our Smoky,” loud enough so she could hear him and she’d think it was
me. So I says I never touched your cat, it was you that did it, loud enough so she heard that as well. Then he says: “Don’t lie. You’ll never get to Heaven if you tell
lies.” So I told him: “You’ll never get to Heaven at all, you rotten lying swine.”

‘So then she takes the shopping in and shouts us both into the house, and when we get in there she tells Ernie to get a stick from the yard, and beat me with it. So he did, real hard, and
they both start laughing their heads off while I’m struggling and trying to get away. Then she gets hold of one of my ears, nipping it to keep me still.’

‘He’s not fibbing,’ Uncle Alfred said, pointing to big blue bruises on the top parts of Alfie’s left ear.

‘She ought to be reported,’ Auntie Dot said. ‘You ought to report her to the police, Marie.’

Marie nodded, looking at Alfie. ‘Then what happened?’

‘I told them, “I’m telling on you!” so Ernie says: “Who’re you going to tell? Your dad’s dead, you moron! You going to tell your mother? She’s in
hospital, she i’n’t going to help you.”

‘So I said I was telling on them both. “As soon as I get in that school, I’m telling the teacher and all the other kids, and I’m showing them what you’ve done. And
I’m telling our Marie,” I said. Then she says: “You get upstairs to bed, you nasty little guttersnipe. You won’t be telling anybody anything, and nobody will believe you if
you do.” ’

‘Let’s have a look where Ernie hit you,’ Marie said.

Alfie took off his shirt. There were small round fingermark bruises on his upper arms, and larger bruises all over him.

‘Then they shut me in the bedroom and bolted the door so I couldn’t get out and they kept me there for two days,’ he went on. ‘Then I thought I aren’t sticking this
a minute longer, I’m getting out of here if it kills me.’

‘How did you get out?’ Uncle Alfred asked.

‘There were some horrible old women’s stockings and two scarves in one of the drawers, so I tied them together to make a rope and tied it round the bedstead and let it out of the
window and climbed out. It wasn’t long enough, and I had to drop the rest of the way into the yard.’

‘And he did come looking for you, I suppose.’ Marie said, drily.

Alfie nodded. ‘I picked a willow stick up by the Wellhead as soon as I saw him, a real whippy one. And I let him get real close, and then I thought: right, you’ve asked for this;
it’s your turn to get some stick, now. So I got my head down and jumped up and chinned him, then before he could get up I gave it him, tit for tat.’ Alfie snorted with laughter, and
added, ‘I told him: “It’s your turn now, you moron!” I don’t think he knew what was happening.’

‘But how did you get back home?’ Auntie Dot asked. ‘You can’t have walked it.’

‘I slept in the waiting room in the train station, and the next morning, I just got on the train with some other people, and stayed on it, and when I saw the ticket collector I locked
myself in the lav, then I got off and walked a bit, and then I got a lift on a lorry that was going to New Holland. Then I got on the ferry, and told the man what had happened, and showed him my
bruises, and he brought me over for nothing. I got on a bus on Corporation Pier, and when the conductor came, I told him the same.’

‘Did you call Mrs Morton any names?’ Marie asked.

Alfie nodded again. ‘I called her a nasty old witch, and she is. And I’m never going back there.’

‘Obviously not. They wouldn’t have you, for one thing, even if I wanted to send you, which I don’t. But what do you think I’m going to do with you? How am I going to go
to work, with you to look after? Answer me that,’ Marie said, directing her question at Alfie, but hoping his godfather and namesake would take the hint and step into the breach.

Uncle Alfred didn’t fail her. ‘He can come and live with us on the smallholding, can’t he, Dot? There’s loads of room now our three have flown the coop. It’s not
far out of Hull, but it’s a lot safer than where you are.’

‘Well, I don’t know,’ Auntie Dot wavered. ‘I think I’m a bit too old to be taking any youngsters on.’

‘I’m not going anywhere,’ Alfie cut in. ‘I’m staying here. Don’t worry about me, I can look after myself.’

‘You change your mind, and you can come and stay with us,’ Uncle Alf told him before they left to catch the bus to Dunswell.’

Marie stood at the gate with Alfie, and watched them go.

‘Where’s my dad buried?’ Alfie demanded, when they were out of sight. ‘I want to see his grave.’