At the Break of Day (16 page)

‘It’s my grandpa. He’s been brought in and I’ve just arrived. I have to see him.’ Rosie was calm now, her voice strong. She could see him down at the end, pale against the white pillow, the white sheets. He was her grandpa but somehow he wasn’t. His eyes were sunken, his chin had dropped and his mouth hung open. She looked again at the Sister. ‘I must see him and then I must talk to you.’

The Sister looked at her, then down at the clipboard, tracing a pencil along a list of names and words and numbers. Rosie didn’t move, just waited. She would wait all afternoon, all evening, all night. She was used to waiting. Didn’t they know? All her life she had waited.

A staff nurse eased past carrying a covered bedpan. An old man sitting next to his bed in a checked wool dressing-gown was picking at the air with clumsy fingers, again and again.

She looked back at the Sister whose navy uniform drew the colour from her tired face. The woman looked up at her, smiling slightly.

‘Well, Doctor has finished his rounds. Perhaps it would do Mr Norton good. But just this once, mind. And I shall be in my office just behind you, to the left.’ She pointed over Rosie’s shoulder and Rosie felt Jack turn, then saw him nod.

‘Thank you, Sister,’ she said and walked down the ward, alone.

She talked gently, quietly to Grandpa who smiled at her but did not speak. She told him that he was looking well, that he would soon be home. But he wasn’t and she knew he wouldn’t. She held his hand which was so much thinner. How could people become so thin so quickly?

She talked of swimming in the pool on holiday, telling him how it had been boarded up when the Navy had taken it over.

‘It would have been more good to them as it was,’ she said. ‘They could have practised their battles.’

She told him about Norah’s clerk, of the Knobbly Knees, of the fun-fair and all the time she held his hand and wanted to say, ‘I love you, Grandpa, and I can’t imagine life without you. I’ve just found you again and I can’t bear it if you die.’

But part of her remembered the words Norah had shouted down the pavement after her. ‘You’ll be pleased. Now you can get on with your bloody job.’ Was that true? She looked down at his hand in hers. No. She would rather there was never a job for her if he could come home again.

She kissed his hand, held it to her cheek and couldn’t say how much she loved him because she would cry and then he would know how very ill he was. So she listened as he tried to talk of the roses but, halfway through, the words died behind lips which were too clumsy to be his.

‘I’ll look after them, don’t worry. There are no greenfly,’ she murmured, watching his face.

‘There are no roses here,’ he murmured, nodding at the dark and grimy yard outside his window.

She touched his hand. ‘Just rest,’ she said.

Though his eyes were sunken, they were the same. They were dark and kind and the eyes of the young man he had once been. The lids, though, were heavy and closing and she reached forward and stroked his cheek. He hadn’t been shaved properly. There was stubble beneath his chin and it was this that made her weep as she walked home with Jack because Grandpa had always shaved each day.

Norah was sitting in the kitchen eating Spam and boiled potatoes. There were some left in the pan. They were overcooked and in pieces. Rosie drained off the cold, thickened water, tipped the potatoes on to a plate, cut a slice of Spam, then a tomato.

‘It’s his heart and his chest,’ she said as she sat down. ‘The Sister says that he might die tomorrow or in three months’ time, or in six months’ time.’

Norah took a drink of water. ‘As long as we’re not expected to have him home.’

Rosie looked down at her plate. ‘No, he’s too ill. But he misses his roses.’ She was tired and the tears were too close to tell Norah that she had a voice like a goddamn saw and the soul of a witch.

As she lay in bed that night she thought of the bleak yard, the soot-stained walls, the emptiness of it all.

At lunchtime Mrs Eaves said she could leave half an hour early because Rosie told her she must sort some things out for Grandpa. She walked home and put two of the smaller roses which grew in pots into the wheelbarrow. They were not strongly scented but their colour was rich. She pushed them through the streets in her Woolworths uniform. The same streets that she had run along yesterday.

Her arms were taut, her shoulders ached and people stared at her again, but it didn’t matter. None of this mattered. Didn’t they know what had happened to her grandpa?

She passed the back of the terrace which fronted on to the rec and turned left down the alley, coming out opposite the slide. She pushed the barrow across the road along to the swings and the footworn grassless earth. She pushed a swing. It squeaked. She looked back at the houses, ripped apart, unrepaired. There was more wallpaper than ever flapping on the end wall.

The park in Lower Falls had been grassed. Picnic tables and ice-cream vans had spotted the ground. She preferred this one. She looked down. The rust from the chains had stained her hand again. She moved behind the swing and pushed the seat, sending it soaring, hearing their laughter from the long lost years.

She pushed the barrow in through the hospital gates and past an ambulance which was parked with its back doors open. She edged round to the left-hand side, walking beside the main building, checking where she was in relation to the annexe which housed Grandpa’s ward.

She walked alongside the soot-blackened walls until she saw the peaked roof of Ward 10. She pushed open two gates which were set into the wall. There were dustbins in one yard and old trolleys in another. She moved on. There was no one else walking, or standing, or watching. There was just the distant smell of cooking; the distant clink of plates, pans, cups.

Rosie stopped. Her hands were blistered. There was a lower wall now and she looked back at the building, shading her eyes against the sun. Then back at the wall. This had to be where the yard was but there was no gate.

She clutched the handles, pushing the wheelbarrow on again, welcoming the pain in her hands because it deflected her grief. She wheeled the roses round to the other side. Here was a small brown gate with a rusted latch which she lifted and then brushed back her hair. She could smell the swings on her hands.

She eased open the gate, looking towards the ward. There was no face looking out but she could see Grandpa eating in bed with a bib on. She lifted first one, then the other rose, putting them where he could see, checking for greenfly though she knew there was none.

She pushed the wheelbarrow home and bathed her hands. The blisters were bleeding. She bound them and then she climbed the stairs, taking a chair from Norah’s room and heaving herself up into the loft, searching through old boxes. At last she found his nailer’s penny. Grandpa had looked diminished in other people’s pyjamas, in a ward which was not his home and she wanted him to remember who he was. She wanted to remember who he was.

That evening she took it in to him and he held it, holding her hand tightly too.

‘They call me Bert here, but my name’s Albert.’

‘I’ll tell them, Grandpa.’

‘I tell them all the time, but it doesn’t make any difference.’

‘I’ll tell them now,’ Rosie said, leaving him, feeling his hand about hers as she found the Sister and told her, and then found the Matron and told her also.

Grandpa was asleep when she returned but he still held the penny. She kissed him and started to leave but as she reached the end of the bed he opened his eyes.

‘There are roses in the yard. They’ll have a gentle scent.’ He was smiling at her, his eyes full of love.

She came the next day and he gave her the penny to put away safely.

‘They called me Albert today,’ he said.

‘Of course they did. They know that’s what you like.’

It was hot in the ward and the water in the jug was warm but he didn’t mind and sipped as Rosie held the glass and then he told her how hot it had been around the nail furnaces, how thirsty they had all become. Rosie stroked his arm and listened as he told her how he had made Flemish tacks, so small that a thousand weighed only five ounces, but he had made hobs, and brush nails, and clinkers too.

He sat up, and she straightened his pillows and he told her how the fire and the chimney were in the middle of the shop, how he used to watch the different colours in the flames when he was a child, how he had woven stories in his mind then, but once he was a nailer he didn’t have the time.

He told her how he would take one of the three iron rods from the fire, turn it with one hand and hammer out the tang, or point, to make the iron harder. He told her of the special coke that was bought from the gas works. It had already been used but was good enough for them once it had been broken up.

Rosie asked him about the boy who had been nailed to the doorpost by his ear, the one he had taken down. Grandpa stopped smiling then and asked for more water. It was still warm and Rosie held the glass to his lips and now he was crying.

She stood up, putting her arm around him, feeling like the parent he had been, listening as he said, ‘He repaid me, you see.’

He wouldn’t talk any more about nailing and she left that night wondering if his heart had broken each time she had cried throughout the years, as hers had just done. And wondering why it was that the tears had come.

As August turned to September and September to October, Rosie and he talked of other things, other people, but never of the nailers. He told her of the books he would like to have written and how he had read them instead.

She told him of Norah’s clerk who had ridden over on his bicycle. How Norah had taken him brass-rubbing at St Cuthbert’s, how she had come back with sore knees and a mouth like a sparrow’s bum which had flashed into a smile the moment he looked at her. They were going again next week, and the next and the next.

‘With a bit of luck and a following wind,’ Rosie said, and Grandpa laughed.

She told him of the letters she had received from Frank and Nancy. They had asked her to write a feature for their paper because, Nancy said, it would cheer Frank up to think of her working at something like that.

‘Why does he need cheering up?’ Grandpa asked as the leaves swirled into the yard, over the wall, snatching at the roses, scudding into corners.

‘Things are a bit difficult on the paper right now. You know how work gets, Grandpa. There are ups and downs.’

But it was more than that, she knew, as she slipped into the yard and pruned the roses before she left that night, putting the old blooms into the canvas bag she had brought. Frank had spoken up for the Anti-Nazi League during the war and the Local Administrator had discovered this. Frank had been questioned by two other guys now, Nancy had told her, adding that Commie-hunting was getting to be quite a sport.

Rosie put away her secateurs and waved to the nurses who were watching from the window. They hadn’t minded about the roses. They had been pleased.

That night and for the rest of the week she worked on an article about Austerity Britain, telling America of the fuel cuts the Midlands would have to suffer, losing power for one day a week; of the imports which still had to be kept at a minimum; how Britain had to export or die; how in 1946 even the new cricket balls for the Test Match had had to be rationed.

She sent this off with a letter to Frank and Nancy telling them that Grandpa was a little stronger but really no better and that she needed to be able to delay her lunch-hour and visit at three, which Mrs Eaves allowed. Maybe another employer wouldn’t and so her career would have to wait for just a while longer.

In October she read that the film star Ronald Reagan had appeared before a Congressional committee investigating Communism in the USA. She read how he had opposed a Hollywood witch-hunt against Communists or anything which might compromise the democratic principles of America. She read that already there was evidence against seventy-nine Hollywood subversives but Nancy wrote and told her that none of these had been named and hysteria was the order of the day.

‘Where the goddamn hell is it all going to end?’ Rosie asked Jack as they walked to the hospital in the afternoon on 1 November. He shook his head.

Frank wasn’t too well, it was the strain of being questioned about activities which were deemed patriotic during the war years. But now the enemy was different and she felt the anger rising again as the wind whipped through her coat.

She kicked the leaves, angry and confused that the world had broken into enemy camps again, before anyone had yet recovered from the last war, and even in America, the land which had always seemed so free, so happy, there were victims.

Nancy had also written to say that the feature was not what they had wanted. They could read that in any paper. ‘What we want from you, my girl, is something from the point of view of the people and don’t leave the new career in the air for too long.’

Rosie and Jack leaned against a lamppost, watching as children swung from a rope tied on the next one, playing chicken with the bikes which raced past in the gloom, listening to the curses of the riders who shook their fists and told the kids that they should be at home in bed.

‘I’ll try again,’ she said to Jack.

That evening Grandpa talked of Bromsgrove again. He sat high up against his pillows, his eyes looking into hers as he told her of the foggers. His breathing was too loud tonight and the Sister had said he was not so well again. He was speaking quickly, as though there was no time, and Rosie felt the fear tighten within her.

He told her how foggers were middlemen who employed nailers and sold their products to the nailmasters. How the nailmaster liked them because the fogger could provide him with whatever he wanted at short notice. This meant that the nailmaster did not have to carry large stocks. It also meant that he did not have to supervise the nailers.

‘The fogger did that, you see,’ Grandpa panted.

Rosie gave him more water. ‘Not now, Grandpa. There’s no hurry.’

‘But I want you to understand, little Rosie. Can’t you see that?’ He paused, coughed and she held a handkerchief to his mouth. ‘Can’t you see that?’ he repeated when he could talk.