The Orphans of Halfpenny Street. Cathy Sharp

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СКАЧАТЬ whatever their denomination, and did what he could to help the poor of the area, regardless of whether they attended his church.

      Ma’s father had disowned her when she married, and he had not relented when she became a widow, even though he could have helped her to stay in the nice little cottage she’d gone to when she wed. Mary Ellen’s elder sister Rose said that Grandpa would’ve given Ma money if she’d grovelled and begged him, but Ma was too proud to beg. Instead, she’d been forced to come here to this slum and fight her battles against an encroaching illness and the tide of dirt that threatened to engulf them.

      Rose still attended the Catholic Church, not out of devotion but because, she said, they had allowed her to take a scholarship under their aegis that had enabled her to enter nursing college. Rose was determined to better herself, to make a good life, and her only way of getting the chance she needed had been to take advantage of being a good Catholic. Father Joe had been a friend to all of them and he took an interest in Rose’s future, telling Ma that she should be proud of her daughter’s hard work.

      ‘You’ve a good daughter there, Mrs O’Hanran,’ he’d said when he came to visit. ‘Respectable and devout, she’ll make a wonderful nurse.’

      Ever since she was Mary Ellen’s age, Rose had dreamed of becoming a nurse one day, and the recent terrible war which had ended only two years earlier had made her even more eager to take up the profession.

      ‘When I see men fresh home from the war, with legs missing and awful scars, some of them so weak that they will never recover, I want to help them,’ Rose had told her young sister. ‘I only wish I had been old enough to go out to the Front – somewhere the fighting was at its worst – to help nurse the men. I could never work in an office or a dress shop when there is something more worthwhile to be done. Hitler is beaten, and London will recover from the Blitz in time, but the injuries some of those men received will never be healed.’

      Rose wanted to help sick people, but she hated the slum area they’d been forced to live in after Pa died, and Mary Ellen knew she wanted to become a nurse so that she need never come back here. She was ashamed of their home and wanted something better. Mary Ellen didn’t care about such things, she just wanted to be at home with her mother … but after today she would be sent away and she wouldn’t be able to see or touch Ma …

      Mary Ellen had often sat unseen on the stairs in the evenings and listened to her mother and sister talking in the kitchen. At nights, Ma lit the gas lamps and made a pot of tea, which they drank together, discussing subjects that they considered her too young to comprehend, but life hadn’t been easy since Pa died, and Mary Ellen understood grief all too well. She heard things that worried her, though she often made sense of only a fraction.

      Yet she knew that Britain was still struggling to pay back its war debts and there were not enough decent jobs for able-bodied men, let alone those who could not do a full day’s work.

      Everyone had hoped rationing would end with the war, but instead it seemed that every month they were told there would be less of something else. ‘Only one ounce of bacon per person per week now, and three pounds of potatoes,’ Ma complained when Rose came home with whatever she could find. ‘We shall all starve before they’ve done – and what was it all about, that’s what I’d like to know.’

      ‘Governments falling out like spoiled children,’ Rose said in a harsh tone. Ma sometimes complained that Rose was becoming a radical and too critical of politics and things that were best left to men, but that just made Rose toss her head and retort, ‘You’ll see, Ma. Women are going to have more to say in the future. It’s time ordinary people had enough to eat and decent homes to live in – it’s time women were equal to men, in wages and everything else.’

      Ma would laugh and warn her that pride came before a fall, but Mary Ellen thought that her sister was right. Why shouldn’t women have more say in their lives? And it wasn’t right that people went hungry. Yet when she said so both Ma and Rose told her she was too young.

      ‘It’s not really the Government’s fault,’ Ma said. ‘There isn’t enough of everything to go round and things haven’t got going yet after the war.’

      ‘And who is to blame for all the shortages, the way the shops are empty even though the war has been over for months and months; more than two years? Who says we have to go on being rationed? No one has enough to eat, Ma. I can’t even buy a decent pair of shoes for work. What did all those men fight for if it wasn’t to make life better for us all? If those fat idiots in Westminster stopped rabbiting on and sorted things out perhaps we shouldn’t have to put up with all this austerity. With a country to rebuild there should be plenty of work for everyone and money to live decently – but it’s still hard to find work for most of the men, even though it may not be as bad as it was after the first big war.’

      Mary Ellen sort of understood, because she was good at listening to people talking and because she was small and quiet they didn’t always realise she was there. She heard Mr Jones the butcher talking about the fact that he couldn’t get supplies of lamb from his usual suppliers.

      The big freeze in January and February had made it seem that life in Austerity Britain could not get worse. And the floods in April with the resulting catastrophic loss of livestock, with millions of sheep drowned and arable crops flooded, had only aggravated the situation.

      Yet here in the East End, which had taken much of the damage during those terrible nights of war when waves of bombers flew like great birds of prey over the city, disease and poverty still haunted the streets. Life had always been hard for these people and somehow they endured, though they never stopped moaning about the bloody Government. Moved by the pity and despair she saw in the faces of wounded men, returned to a life without work and precious little to eat, Rose was fired with a zeal to do what she could to put things right, to make life better for others as well as herself. A nursing career was the only way she knew to leave the poverty of the East End behind her and find the kind of life she wanted: a way of forgetting the drabness of life in Austerity Britain.

      Mary Ellen admired her sister. Rose was dark-haired and beautiful, with her pert nose, full red lips and firm chin. She was also one of the most determined people that Mary Ellen had ever come across.

      Mary Ellen finished chalking the squares for her game of hopscotch and then selected a flat stone from amongst the filth in the gutters. Her chores finished for the day, she’d come out to play while Ma had a rest on the bed, and they waited for Rose to return home from work with food for their tea.

      Mary Ellen threw her stone into the first square and hopped into the one after it. She was preparing to perform a hop, skip and jump before turning to go back and pick up her stone when a voice spoke from behind her and made her start and lose her balance.

      Turning, she saw a boy of similar age to her own. He was a little taller, dressed in long trousers that had been cut down from an old pair of his brother’s, a washed-out shirt and scuffed black boots. His dark auburn hair was tousled and unwashed, his nose red and dripping and there were streaks of dirt on his face where he’d rubbed it with his filthy hands. As she watched he wiped his nose on the back of his hand and then, to her disgust, slid his hand down his trousers. Ma might be ill and they might be poor, but Mary Ellen was clothed in an almost clean cotton pinafore skirt and blouse her mother had made before she became ill, and she had better manners than to wipe snot on her dress.

      ‘That’s rude, that is, Billy Baggins,’ she said. ‘What did you make me jump for? I shall have to start again now.’

      ‘I didn’t mean to, Mary Ellen,’ he answered meekly. ‘Can I play?’

      ‘You’ll have to find a stone,’ СКАЧАТЬ