She tried to push despondency aside and get into the festive mood. She extracted the dollar bills from the envelope – the first month’s payment, and said, ‘Now that you’ve broken up from school and I’m not needed at the guesthouse till after New Year, what do you say to having a day in town, just the two of us, and buying in some goodies and maybe a few presents for people?’
‘Grand!’ Josie said, glad that her aunt’s good humour seemed to have returned. ‘And,’ she went on, anxious not to be a drain on resources, ‘I do know all about Santa Claus and that, you know. A girl at school told me.’
‘That’s all right then,’ Hannah said with a mock sigh of relief. She was glad she’d used some of her wages to buy things for Josie for weeks now to make sure her first Christmas without her mother and family around her wouldn’t be a total disappointment. Santa Claus-believer or not, she would get a stocking to open on Christmas Day morning, before setting off for Gloria’s where it had been arranged they would spend the day.
And the day wouldn’t have been so bad at all, despite the lack of festive cheer in the Bradley household, if Arthur hadn’t seen fit to launch one of his verbal attacks on Hannah in the early hours of Christmas morning.
He’d been moody since he’d come home that afternoon and Hannah couldn’t understand why. He should have been in good spirits; they’d had a little party in the office at lunchtime, a few drinks with his colleagues and his boss, and he’d come home with a sizeable bonus, and a large box of chocolates for Hannah, the same as all the company wives had.
Hannah at least was delighted for, with the sweet ration still in place, chocolates were like gold dust, and yet nothing seemed to cheer Arthur.
Hannah wasn’t too worried. She knew her husband’s passion for hoarding money and for spending as little as possible and she thought it had probably upset him to have to increase her housekeeping in order to supply the few extras that even he saw they needed at Christmas time.
She took it as a hopeful sign that he agreed to go with her and Josie to the Abbey for Midnight Mass, certain the beautifully clear night with the stars twinkling and the moon shining down, lighting up the earlier fall of snow that crackled under people’s feet, would be enough to lift anyone’s spirits. ‘Very Christmassy, a bit of snow,’ she said, slipping her arm through Arthur’s.
He just grunted a response, but Josie squeezed Hannah’s other hand and said, ‘I love snow too.’
Neither of them knew of the long hard winter to come when they’d be heartily sick of snow, but that night, it had a sense of rightness about it. The world was a beautiful place, Hannah decided, and it was almost Christmas Day. What could be better?
She couldn’t believe it when she felt Arthur’s weight upon her later that night. She’d been almost asleep, the carols still running in her head when he launched his attack as he came in from the bathroom. She tried to twist away from his grasp and felt her nightie rip open as it was torn from her. ‘For pity’s sake, Arthur, will you leave me be?’ she cried.
But it was if she hadn’t spoken and somehow the obscene words that Arthur spat out that night seemed to defile all that had gone before.
Afterwards, aching everywhere, Hannah cried herself to sleep and was in no great humour for Arthur’s abject apology the next day. ‘Don’t say you’re sorry,’ she cried. ‘Just don’t. If you were sorry, you’d not do such things to me. Leave me be, Arthur. It’s not right the things you do. Surely you can see that?’
Arthur got to his feet, avoiding her eyes, and began to dress. ‘Look me full in the face and tell me what you do is normal behaviour,’ she demanded shrilly.
And then Arthur faced her, his own face expressionless and his voice cold. ‘If you’ve quite finished your tantrum,’ he said, ‘it’s time to get up.’ He paused at the door and said, ‘By the way, my dear – Happy Christmas.’
If Hannah had anything to hand she would have hurled it after Arthur. Instead she punched the life out of the pillow and imagined it to be his face. She knew that Arthur would never in a million years believe that he might be in the wrong. In a way, she wished that she wasn’t going to Gloria’s house that day. Gloria was too astute by half and Hannah knew that feeling and looking as she did, she’d not be able to convince her that her life was hunky-dory.
Hannah was right; Gloria was not fooled. She sensed the tension in every line of Hannah’s face and the smile that seemed to have been nailed there. Only Arthur seemed normal, for Josie was far too quiet, especially as it was Christmas Day.
I’ll pop over and see her one day soon, she promised herself, and have a chat. See what’s what. But she couldn’t, for the bad weather put paid to any plans she had.
At first, most people had been quite philosophical about the snow. After all, that’s what happened in winter and Birmingham only really got a sprinkling of it that didn’t last long. The children loved it through the Christmas holidays, making snowmen, hurling snowballs at the unsuspecting and making slides that were a danger to life and limb for the unwary.
The adults struggled to maintain some semblance of order to their lives, going to work and shopping and later, when the schools reopened, taking children to school. But gradually things slowed down and ground to a halt altogether in some cases. The snow was relentless and blown into drifts by the gusting winds. This then froze solid at night and was covered by more snow the next day. The skies were leaden grey and not a glimmer of sun penetrated them and so lights were kept on most of the day and fires stoked up.
This caused a further problem in the increase in power used and so power cuts began and coal was rationed. Trams and trains were very late, or cancelled altogether. They couldn’t run on rails filled with frozen ice, while buses and other vehicles couldn’t operate on roads cut off by snow. As fast as the emergency services cleared them, they were soon as bad as ever.
1947 was the first year Gloria had not gone to the January Sales in the city centre stores. Normally, she stocked up on things for the guesthouse, as well as finding a few choice bargains for herself.
Even collecting the weekly rations was a chore. Not indeed that there was much in the shops to be had, for many supplies were just not getting through. One woman that very day in the grocer’s had commented to anyone interested, ‘Looks like the bloke upstairs thinks Hitler d’aint kill enough of us already with his bloody bombs, he’s now trying to starve us to death.’
She wasn’t so far wrong either, Gloria remarked to Amy later. ‘I mean, I don’t say it’s got much to do with God, like, but some of the shelves are near empty. And it’s no joke with half the stuff on ration anyhow. I mean, if they haven’t got one thing in, then you’ve got hardly much choice to get anything else. Must be a nightmare for women with families to feed.’
Gloria was glad she had Amy to talk to, glad their back doors were not that far away and that Tom always cleared the path so they could pop into one another’s houses. She often thought she’d have gone mad in that big rambling house without Amy. Of course, normally she would have been kept busy. She was usually quieter through December, but once the New Year was over, the commercial travellers were on the road again, trying to make up the money spent out in the festive season.
But not this year. In a way, she was pleased she didn’t have to heat the whole place as well as finding coal for the residents’ dining room and lounge for there was a desperate shortage of it. As it was, she’d shut off all the house, but her own rooms, and even then she often went to bed early to save fuel.
She wasn’t in trouble yet with money. She was canny with it and had plenty saved and yet she knew she couldn’t go on with the situation indefinitely without any income.
She wasn’t the only one. Many people either couldn’t get to work, or got there and found there was no heating and often