War Children Read online

  ‘A clean house and a decent man and something to put in a sandwich,’ Ma said, ‘is as big a dream to a girl like Mattie as any palace.’

  It was that way now, in the story Mattie told me on the Empty Steps. This time Mattie lived in Germany. She lived with Antonio Neckar in a little rose-covered cottage with a garden where Mattie grew vegetables. They had lovely sofa-coverings and curtains made of the softest, finest Waffenfabrik. (‘I figured it out, Nancy,’ she said. ‘Waffen means weaving: doesn’t it sound like it? Waffenfabrik is woven fabric – that lovely soft sort of stuff that they puts on cushions and armchairs.’)

  Mattie made sausage sandwiches every morning for Antonio’s dinner, and sent him out to work with a little package of them under his arm in brown paper. He’d sit at his table in the factory and assemble pistols, thinking all the time of his dear Mattie and determined to make good guns that would help her poor homeland be free.

  ‘He have trouble with his eyes,’ Mattie told me, ‘because some of the parts in the pistols is very small and he spends all day squinting at all the little springs and bits. And he gets headaches sometimes when he comes home of an evening, from all the squinting, and I bathes his poor forehead with a damp cloth. He’ve a lovely high forehead – a noble forehead. And sometimes when I’m wiping his poor head he’ll put his hand on mine and we just stays there, him in his favourite armchair and me standing over him, saying nothing, happy, listening to the German band playing out in the square.’

  Mattie always got a look in her eyes when she was telling a story like that. A faraway look. She wasn’t seeing the dirty court with its piles of rubbish, or the barefoot kids in their castoff clothes and their scabs. She was, I knew, seeing the place she described. She was in a kind of a trance. And I often longed just once to glimpse the places that she saw, for all that they were never palaces. Because when I looked around all I saw was what was there, and what was there wasn’t a whole lot to look at.

  I suppose I should have quizzed Mattie about the pistol. I knew her too well to think she’d have told me anything if she didn’t want to, but still I should have asked. I’d have felt better after. Because Mattie’s stories took her over in a way, and she got … impractical, I suppose, is the best word for it. And in lives like ours, and in days like them days especially, impractical was one thing that you just couldn’t afford to get. Mattie’s dreams were powerful, and Mattie’s dreams were nice; but they were dreams. In the real world, like the Empty Steps they led nowhere.

  My Ma had said nothing to my Da about the Mauser, and she’d warned me to keep quiet too.

  ‘There’s no point in worrying him,’ she said to me. ‘I only hope Mattie have the sense to dump it someplace. The best we can all do is forget we ever saw it.’

  I agreed with her completely, but I had a bad feeling about that gun. To Mattie, now, it was a sort of memento of Antonio. I’d seen her get like that about odd things before. There was one time that we found a little hip-flask in the gutter in Elliot Place. It was early one morning when we were on our way back from looking for the loose coal on the quays. A few lumps used always fall off the wagons bringing the unloaded coal to the yards, and you’d always see women and children there scavenging for them. It was all the fuel that some people had – unless they burned the furniture, which most of them had done long ago anyhow, if they’d ever had any furniture.

  But oh, that flask! Mattie kept it for days. It became part of one of her oddest fantasies, about a young doctor who loved the poor. This doctor had invented a cure for consumption, the great scourge of the slums. There was only one batch of the cure and he’d kept it in the flask for safety. He’d been attacked while he was answering an emergency call, and he’d beaten off his attackers but dropped the flask. Now he was lying hurted in one of the city hospitals, despairing of ever finding again the cure he couldn’t duplicate. Mattie would keep it safe for him, hiding it from thieves and from other, evil doctors who’d steal his discovery.

  I knew myself that the flask was for holding drink. You could see a dozen like it in the window of Peterson’s shop. But the power of Mattie’s stories was so strong that I started looking out for strangers in the court, especially for anyone who looked like an unscrupulous doctor. They’d have been easy to spot there, God knows: doctors didn’t come anywhere near the likes of us.

  Anyway Mattie had managed to hide the flask somewhere, but Chancer Foley, her Da, came across it. He lost his rag when he found it had no drink in it, but then he realised the flask was silver and could be sold. When Mattie found he’d sold it she nearly went mad herself. The odd thing was, the way she ranted you could see that in some way she really believed her own fantasy. Chancer had acted as an agent for one of the evil doctors, she said. He’d betrayed her young hero and cheated the poor of a cure for a disease that plagued them. Was there anything he wouldn’t do for drink? Now he’d sold human life for drink-money, and he’d pay for it in hell!

  It would have been all right if she’d talked like that to me. But she’d screamed it at Chancer himself as he drank with his cronies in a pub – spending the few shillings he’d got for the flask.

  When he couldn’t shut her up, and the landlord told him to get out if he couldn’t control her, Chancer flared up in a drunken rage. He kicked Mattie out into the street and there and then he gave her a beating that was still talked of in the court, even there where my own parents’ habit of not beating their children was looked on as something strange and nearly sinful.

  ‘You won’t dance for a while now, Dancer,’ Chancer Foley raged, kicking Mattie as she lay dazed and bleeding in the dirt of the street. ‘You won’t dance around screaming at a poor man in his misery!’

  In the end, some of the men had pulled him off before he killed her. Chancer had a terrible temper when he was drunk, at least with his wife and children. I was amazed that Mattie had crossed him in his cups, but even more when I heard the things she’d said. It was as though the fantasy was so strong that she’d forgotten the reality. Like I say, she was impractical.

  When I got my Ma on her own that night, after I’d talked to Mattie on the Empty Steps, I told her the latest.

  ‘She have that gun someplace still, Ma,’ I said. ‘She have it hid – I’m sure of it.’

  Ma looked worried, but there was nothing we could do. Mattie was a wild thing.

  The next morning, just after eight o’clock, the Auxies and the soldiers came back. They blocked the entrances to the court as they’d done two mornings before, and they got off their lorries and stood around with bayonets fixed on their rifles. The soldiers weren’t too bad, but the Auxies must have been specially picked for their bad tempers. Kids would go up to the friendlier-looking Tommies and ask them questions – what they were looking for and so on – and sometimes they’d answer and they’d crack a joke. But from the Auxies you’d get a curse at best, and more often a kick. They drank too much, my Da said: every morning started off for them with a hangover.

  When they were all in place that day a last police tender drove in. In the back there were more Auxies and a forlorn-looking figure who was obviously a prisoner. He was dressed in a white shirt that was torn and bloody, and his face was puffed and bruised and bloody too from being beaten. When they threw him off the back of the lorry he landed on his back and cried out in pain, clutching one shoulder with a bloody hand. My heart went out to him, the way your heart would go out to any hurted thing. But at the same time a part of me wished that he’d drop stone dead where he stood. Because even under the bruising and the swelling I recognised the man: it was the stranger who’d been staying in Nolans’, the one we’d thought must own the gun.

  I’d been in the street when I saw the first tenders come into the court, and I’d wondered whether to run home or to stay and watch. When I saw the prisoner I was doubly torn, not knowing what to do. The Auxies drove the man on with cuffs and riflebutts to Nolans’, where old Mrs Nolan was standing in the doorway with her apron up to her mouth, look
ing in horror at the poor face of her lodger coming towards her. The Tans pushed him in the door, and her too, and followed them in. There was a great noise of things breaking, and a lot of cursing. A woman’s voice screamed in anguish, and a man’s in pain. Then the prisoner was flung out the door again; he landed in the street with a big groan and a fresh bloody place on his face.

  People stood around, frozen, watching. I was frozen too. I think in my heart I knew what was coming next, but I didn’t want to know. A half-dozen doors down from Nolans’ was a high wall, and behind that wall was the back yard we shared with the Foleys. The bloodied man was walking down the street towards the wall. He staggered like a drunken man, hardly able to stand upright, holding his maimed shoulder, leaving drops of blood on the cobbles as he went. A half-dozen Auxies walked around him, grim and silent now, watching him, prodding him on with bayonets.

  When the man reached the wall he stopped and put his back to it. He slid slowly down till he was sitting in the street. He wept. We all stood looking. You could feel the people’s pity. Most of us had no truck with rebels or rebelling, but this was only a hurted man crying. The Auxies had had him; and you wouldn’t wish that on your worst enemy.

  One of the Auxies barked at the man.

  ‘Well?’ he said. ‘Was it here?’

  It wasn’t an English accent, or even a Scottish one. Maybe it was Canadian or American. There was all sorts in the Auxies.

  The weeping man nodded his head.

  ‘It was,’ he said, and the two words were a sob.

  The Auxie who’d spoken turned to his men. ‘Get that damned gun,’ he said. ‘And I don’t care if you have to tear down every house in the place.’

  At once the Auxies were running round both ends of the wall, heading for the houses that backed onto the yard. My house. Mattie’s house. My heart was in my mouth. I knew they’d destroy everything in our house, but there wasn’t so much to destroy. It wasn’t things I was worried about: it was Mattie.

  I was torn between a longing to run home and a longing to stay where I could see it all. I knew my Ma would be worried about me, but she’d be glad I wasn’t home. They would go through our house like a whirlwind, and they’d break what they could break; but at least she’d be safe in the knowledge that there was nothing dangerous there. With me on her hands she’d only worry more.

  I told myself this, but still I wondered. From our house I could try to get into the yard. I could try to see what was happening with Mattie. I’d no idea where her secret place was, but I was certain that the pistol would be there. If the Auxies found it there was no telling what they’d do. Chancer Foley would make the most unlikely suspect as a gunman that I could imagine; but unlikely men had been shot as gunmen already, and men and boys shot without any hint of suspicion at all.

  Some people made a move to follow in the direction the Auxies had gone, to see what was happening. But the soldiers and the other Auxies kept us all back, watching us for signs of suspicious movements. Harmless-looking men had pulled out guns before in situations like this, and started blazing away at them. It wasn’t simple brutality, I should say that for them. They had to be careful.

  Then there was shouting, and a small figure came flying around the corner of the high wall. It was Mattie, with her dancing feet running and her hair flying behind her. Dark figures of Auxies ran after her, but I had no eyes for them at all because I’d seen what Mattie was carrying, holding it by its butt with her two little hands: the ugly black memento of Antonio, the cursed Mauser.

  One of the waiting Auxies made a grab at her and missed. She screamed at him to leave her alone. More of them tried to pen her in, but she wrong-footed them with those dancing feet, dodging around them and in and out of groups of bystanders, leading her pursuers a merry dance. People shied away from her as she neared them – shied away not from her but from that ugly black thing she was holding in her hands. The Auxies and soldiers were shouting and cursing, a dozen of them or more pushing towards her and getting mixed up with locals and shoving them out of the way.

  I don’t know what Mattie thought she was doing. She must have known the entrances to the court would be blocked. There was never a way out for her, and the place was crawling with British.

  An Auxie caught Mattie’s shoulder. She smashed his hand away with the pistol and he cursed. Mattie danced off again. She reached the Empty Steps and she danced up them to the top. Then she just stood there, breathing hard. She looked up and out around the broken-backed roofs of the court, peered at all the faces turned towards her as though looking for someone in particular.

  No-one said a word; people just backed away and watched this mad girl. The British too had quietened, knowing they had her now, a big circle of khaki and black surrounding the ragged creature on the Empty Steps – my best friend, none of them taking their eyes off her, none of them taking their eyes off the death in her hands.

  ‘Antonio!’ Mattie shouted, really loud.

  She did. I heard her.

  I can hear her still.

  She should never have raised the gun. All the rest she might have got away with. If she’d got a beating itself, sure, it wouldn’t have been the first she’d had. They mightn’t have believed she knew nothing, but they wouldn’t have tortured a child. Maybe they would if they’d been let, I don’t know; but surely they wouldn’t have been let torture a young girl.

  But she did raise the gun, and she pointed it at a soldier, and she squeezed the trigger.

  There was a very loud click as the hammer fell. No bang, just a very loud click sounding in the total silence. Maybe it was a misfire. Maybe the pistol was empty. But it didn’t fire.

  The British guns did. Three, four, maybe half a dozen of them. All I heard was a ragged volley, swollen by the echoes from the crowded houses in that mean square, and Mattie Foley was raised up off the Empty Steps with the force of the bullets. It seemed to happen very slowly. The Dancer Foley’s feet did a last little flurry in the air, and her skinny body wriggled with the force of bullets. She spun around completely. Then she fell in a little bundle of nothing and tumbled down to lie in the dirt at the foot of the steps.

  I felt like I’d been shot myself. It didn’t hurt, but it was like a big lump of lead had been slammed into my chest and stayed stuck there. I felt like I was sinking into the ground with the weight of it. The women started keening and the men started cursing and the children started crying. They all started running away, as if they expected the soldiers and Auxies to mow them all down now. Stranger things had happened. I just stood there looking at Mattie. The British closed in around her, and all I could see was the odd flash of rags through gaps between their boots. Someone who was crying and saying broken words grabbed me and hustled me off. I fought them, fought to stay where I could see my friend. But the person was too strong. When we got around the corner of the high wall I looked to see who it was. It was my Ma.

  Our house wasn’t broken up too bad. Mattie had made her run with the gun before the Tans got properly started on it. Ma sat me down at the kitchen table, but I started shivering so hard in my whole body that my knees bounced off the bottom of the table. I think I had some kind of a fit. I know that I fell on the ground and I was shaking and then I was gone. When I woke up I was lying in the bed with an overcoat over me and Ma was bathing my forehead with cold water from the bucket. She was crying without making any noise.

  ‘The poor child,’ she kept saying. ‘The poor, poor child.’

  I suppose she was talking about Mattie. Maybe she was talking about me. She tried to get me talking but I hadn’t the heart to say anything. There didn’t seem to be anything to say. After a long time she left me alone in the room with the curtains pulled and I lay in the dark and I stared at nothing. I didn’t actually cry at all. I just stared. I don’t know what I thought about – nothing, I think, if you can think about nothing. Little rose-covered cottages and sofas covered with Waffenfabrik and sausage sandwiches, maybe. Antonio Neckar with his headaches
and his squinty eyes.

  My Da came in to me that night when he got home.

  ‘Nancy,’ he said, ‘would you not come out and talk to us?’

  He put a hand on my shoulder and I held it. He worked on the docks, my Da. He was a big strong man but I never heard him say a cross word to one of us kids unless he had to. One time a man blamed my brother Ray for breaking his window. He blamed Ray because Ray was outside when the man came out to see who’d done it. Ray swore he hadn’t but the man wanted to take it out on somebody. He was boxing Ray’s head when Da came up and asked Ray if he’d broken the window. Again Ray said he hadn’t. The man called Ray a liar, and still tried to hit him. Da hit the man a single box that left him stretched out on the street with his jaw broke.

  ‘When you call my son a liar,’ he said to the man, ‘then you call me a liar. I may not have much but I have my word. Don’t try and take it away from me.’

  Afterwards I found out that Ray really had broken the window, but he was ashamed to tell Da because he’d have been disappointed. Years later, when Da was dying, Ray, a grown man then, confessed that thing to him. Da laughed.

  ‘Sure, I knew you were after doing it,’ he said to Ray. ‘But that fellow was only a bully. And I never liked bullies.’

  When I held my Da’s hand that night, the time Mattie Foley got shot, that’s when I started to cry. I cried and I cried and I shook the same way I’d been shaking at the kitchen table. Da held me tight till the sobbing went down, then he brought me out and sat me down and Ma gave me a cup of sweet tea. Jim and Ray were sitting by the fire. No-one said anything. We were sitting like that for a while when there was a knock on the door. My Da opened it and two men were standing there. They were strangers.