Made in Myrtle Street (Prequel) (4 page)

‘It was just something that Laura said. That it might be better to have been paid off rather than keep the jobs open like the Corporation lads have. In case some of us don’t come back.’

Big Charlie rested his arms on the parapet of the steel bridge, his chin resting on his clenched fists. He gazed out at the smoky industry of the shunting yard. ‘What do you me … like … killed?’

‘Either that or run off with some French Madam bloody Waselle,’ Liam retorted tartly. ‘There’s probably about the same chance of either and that’s no chance.’

‘Well, maybe or maybe not,’ Edward said thoughtfully. ‘The papers have said that there’s tens of thousands of French soldiers been killed. The German army has been mowing them down like skittles. Happen that Laura was right to be afraid.’

‘A right game of soldiers this is turning out to be,’ muttered Liam. ‘There’s none of us can afford to get killed.’

‘Aye. It’s a bit of a sod that is,’ said Big Charlie ponderously.

The three soldiers walked on up Cross Lane accompanied by many greetings from friends and neighbours, some of whom applauded them as they passed. Salford was getting caught up in the fever of excitement as the country went to war. There was to be a big meeting that evening at which the citizens of the town were to be exhorted by grey flecked local dignitaries to register for the new Salford Battalions. The hate against the Germans was being stoked daily by the newspaper accounts of atrocities. The outrage grew as ever more lurid details were added when the stories were recounted in the Salford streets. The savagery of the Huns dominated the conversations in the pubs and factories, and on the corners of Trafford Road.

There was a consensus amongst both the men and the women that these brutes needed to be dealt a sharp lesson, that they must be stopped before they took it into their heads to invade Britain and to defile their wives and daughters. This was an honourable cause for any red-blooded male and the government’s pleas for the security of freedoms and the defence of the realm and the British Empire added a noble and nationalistic veneer.

Nearing the castellated and imposing structure of the Victorian barracks their hearts started to pound. In a moment of passion, they had made a commitment that would change their lives. They would be introduced to experiences that they had only dreamt about as young boys when they had seen the soldiers marching down Cross Lane.

Heading towards the entrance, they joined other men from the Territorial Army that they had befriended over the last few years. Edward felt the pain and remorse of separation from his young family and yet the strange thrill of transferring into the secure and familiar, regimented life of the Army and the promise of adventure that it held. He stepped through the Drill Hall gates and he was a soldier – Private 2789 Edward Craigie of the Lancashire Fusiliers.

The transition as he walked through the majestic gates was almost brutally fast. It was only a short time before this that he had been a Terrier – a member of the Territorial Army – along with many of his friends, neighbours and workmates. They were known locally as the ‘Saturday Night Soldiers’ because that was when they did their training.

Joining the Terriers and having the chance to go away to annual camp had been a bit of an adventure prompted, also, by an honourable determination to stand up for their families and for Salford if they were called upon to do so. When they had enlisted in the Territorial Army the concept of it was simply as a home defence force and with no obligation to serve overseas. The possibility of fighting for King and Country in a previously unheard of part of the World, or even of dying in some foreign field, had been merely the hyperbole of the bored upper classes.

Now the three friends were waiting to put their signatures
to the documents that would bind them to become regulars in the 1/8 Battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers, the ‘1’ indicating the first line formations that had been created from the Territorial Forces. Soon they would be leaving for foreign fields with alien cultures and strange languages.

Long queues stretched out in front of the registration desks in the huge Training Hall. The hubbub of noisy chattering drifted off into the lofty, white-girdered roof space but to their right they could hear the strident, barking commands of the Sergeant Major as he ordered the new arrivals into their appropriate lines. They sheepishly joined the queue indicated and put their equipment on the floor; shuffling it along as they slowly progressed towards the form-filling officer.

They smiled uncomfortably as the officer in the adjacent desk yelled at an embarrassed youth who had replied ‘my street’ when questioned as to where he lived. The officer appeared to be the only person in the room who didn’t know that My Street was just off Eccles New Road. The blushing youth, his clutching hands over his stomach belying the discomfort that he was now clearly suffering, was trying in vain to persuade the officer that it was a genuine address.

Progress in the queue seemed painfully slow and the over-vigorous nudge in his back almost sent the day-dreaming Edward stumbling over his rucksack. Big Charlie, chuckling loudly, was nodding towards Liam. ‘See the little fella. Looks as though he’s got labour pains and sucking a lemon at the same time.’

Liam’s slightly crouching position, drawn in cheeks and puckered mouth did, indeed, suggest the misfortune that Big Charlie had described. ‘Are you alright, mate?’ Edward enquired with genuine concern.

‘Not really. I’m seriously regretting those last two pints in The Railway,’ Liam groaned.

‘Why don’t you nip off to the toilet then? It’s going to be a while before we get to the desk.’

‘I’ve just tried that but that big mouthed sod over there spotted me and gave me a right rollicking,’ Liam answered, nodding towards the RSM. Gleaming beads of sweat were now standing out on their small friend’s forehead. ‘I can’t hold out much longer.’

Big Charlie, more inclined to action than to words, picked up Liam’s equipment and ushered his miserable friend to the front of the queue. There, his massive presence helped to persuade the man who was next in the line that allowing Liam to go in front of him was a suggestion that held great merit. The crisis was averted and within minutes Liam was rushing towards the exit door and heading for the toilet.

Once the registration was complete, however, they seemed to barely have time to think. Instructions and equipment came at them in an unabated rush. They were sent to the stables to clean and prepare the horses then, before that job was finished, they were despatched upstairs to the store rooms to carry down bales of blankets. Later, given a five minute break, they had hardly taken a couple of sips from their mugs of hot tea when they were sent off again; this time it was to clean and polish the big artillery guns in the yard at the back of the barracks.

‘Bloody wars. This is worse than being at home with our Brig when her old granny is coming on one of her state visits,’ Liam grumbled. ‘At least, there, Brig is grateful to me afterwards and I can usually wangle a couple of pints in the Railway. These miserable sods won’t even let you have a mouthful of your tea.’

‘Stop complaining, Murphy, and get on with it.’ Liam was galvanised into a renewed urgency as the RSM’s rasping tones, now somewhat hoarser after his day of shouting at the unfortunate new recruits, emanated from a broken pane in the officer’s toilet window. ‘You have already put more liquid inside you today than your useless little bladder can hold,’ bellowed the unseen but intimidating presence.

In the late afternoon, they were marched down to Cross Lane station where a crowd had gathered to wave them off. A lump came into Edward’s throat when he saw his young daughter, Laura, and her friend sucking on their liquorice sticks amongst the enthusiastically waving throng.

‘Ta ra Mr Craigie,’ screamed Amy excitedly. ‘Don’t forget to pull tha socks up.’

The image of his daughter, her golden red hair framing her morose pale face, a tear gleaming in the corner of her eye, her hand waving uncertainly, haunted his mind throughout the journey to Bolton and on to the training camp in Turton.

***

29 Myrtle Street

Cross Lane

Salford 5

Lancs

5th September 1914

Dear Dad,

I hope that you like your new camp. Mam said that your beds are only bags full of straw so I hope that they made sure that there were no creepy-crawlies in it first.

Mam said that I have to write a letter to tell you about my haxident and I am very sorry about the nose on your white pot dog. It looks alright though now since we stuck the aniseed ball into the hole. My best friend, Amy, had a big nail sticking out at the front of her clogs that she didn’t know about and it stuck in the coalman’s horse when she was pinching a ride on its back and it jumped a bit and some sacks fell off. The coalman wasn’t very pleased so I borrowed your hammer and that shoe thing to knock it back in. When I hit the nail her clog went up in the air and knocked the dog off the mantelpiece but it wasn’t my fault because it just jumped up and the nail could have stuck in Amy if we didn’t try to knock it back in.

I told Grandma and she said that she would swap it for her dog but Mam said I had to tell you anyway, so I am sorry because I know that you liked it.

I don’t think that there is a ‘h’ in front of haxident but I couldn’t find axident in your dictionary and our Edward said that is how to spell it and Mam keeps telling me to hurry up because she hasn’t got all day to be waiting. Our Edward has been cleaning his delivery bike from the greengrocers all morning because he says that it will go faster but he can hardly hold it up.

Mam let me help her to whitewash the backyard yesterday so that it will look nice for when you get back. She just let me do the bottom bits so that I wouldn’t get splashed. I was being very careful and didn’t mean to get it on the cat but anyway it looked better with white patches on it like a cow.

I hope that you will be safe when you go to another country because in our books at school there seems to be a lot of fierce people with knives and spears. Be careful if you go to the pub with Mr Murphy when you get there.

I’m going now because our Mary is getting on my nerves crying all the time even when I push her dummy back in.

Love

Laura

***

They had been still going through their intensive training and drilling when they had heard on the 5th September that they were to be sent to Egypt.

Boarding their train for Southampton on the 9th September their worries and concerns for the families left at home were overwhelmed, for the moment, by the scale of the operation. It took forty trains to move the 15,500 men, their horses and guns and all the support equipment down to the south coast. The next day they boarded HMT ‘Neuralia' at Southampton and at midnight they crept out of the harbour under a dark sky and a total blackout. As they looked back their last view of England was of a multitude of searchlights stabbing the blackness of the night.

Staring out into the darkness at the receding columns of light, Edward felt more profoundly than ever the trauma of the separation from the family that he had abandoned in Myrtle Street. Laura would have put little Mary in bed with her by now whilst the other kids would be in the next room, topping and tailing in the one big bed. The widening gap of the black sea was the final act in the separation. It denied him the right to walk back if his family cried out. Would the community around Myrtle Street embrace and protect its own in the same way that those who surrounded him as a child had? There was a different feel to the area where he now lived. It had grown dramatically in the last twenty years with the opening of the Docks and the upsurge in industrial development in Trafford Park. New shops and offices had been springing up everywhere and there was generally a greater sense of scheduled urgency.

But the old Salford above the railway line where he had grown up still had a much more traditional village feel about it. It was dominated by the large cattle market and the public houses that had been built to serve it but dotted around the area there was a selection of factories, cotton mills, stables, a variety theatre and the new Picture House. He had taken Laura there a couple of times to see the cinematograph shows.

He had been born in this top village in 1882, eight years after his parents had moved from Hulme pushing a borrowed handcart piled high with their personal possessions and their two young sons. His father, James, had had a trade as a wood turner but their life in Manchester had been tough as for most working class families. Utilitarian back-to-back housing with flooding drains from privies shared between a number of homes and the crushing poverty of unemployment meant disease was rife but treatment was poor. There they had had few rights and little property but the growing industry of Salford had offered many of them a beacon of hope. Arriving in their new house they had been given a hand to move in their meagre furnishings by the neighbours who also supplied cups of tea, sandwiches for lunch, food for tea, a minding service for the children and an introduction into the social framework of the street.

The Craigies’ dream of a secure environment for their young family had, however, been cruelly shattered when, only two years after Edward’s birth, his father James had died. In a desperate plight, his widowed mother, Martha, and her five young children had moved a hundred yards up Ellor Street into her mother’s house in Turner Street. There she had been only a ten minute walk from some of the large houses around Langworthy Road where, to make ends meet, she had taken a job as a charwoman.

Edward gripped the rail and spread his feet to brace himself against the gentle swaying. He stared down into the inky blackness of the sea edged by the white frond as it lapped against the side of the ship. He hadn’t felt deprived by the hardship or even aware of it. Only the families of the shopkeepers had some extra luxuries and that was their right. Fortunately, however, where the state failed the community cared. Neighbours would look out for the children, they would frequent the streets, spare the time to talk and, without being intrusive, they understood and cared about each other's needs. Shop proprietors stood behind their counters and they knew the customers and their families. They exchanged news and gossip, and formed an essential element of a mutually supportive social structure. They were aware of problems that families might have and were prepared to help when and where they could.