A Little Bit on the Side Read Online Free PDF Page B

brought back that would otherwise have given us a bit extra. Poor bugger scarcely had enough left to buy his few fags.’
    When old enough to leave the maternal nest, Jimmy attended the local Catholic school during the week and the local Catholic church on Sunday.
    ‘Religion dominated our lives spiritually and physically then,’ he said, ‘Couldn’t get away from it even at home, as the bloody church loomed over the wall at the back of the yard.’
    He grew up in the thirties to see his two older brothers pass seamlessly from school to unemployment, with no apparent hope of anything to come in the future, and then despite his youth, for reasons he could never seem to articulate precisely to Jack, he began gradually to question the very basis of his religious indoctrination.
    ‘I could never quite understand why I changed,’ he said, ‘As the rest of the family stuck with the faith through thick and thin. Dad seemed quite untroubled by the way I was going, but that was the end of it with my mother, and whenever Dad wasn’t around she’d find any excuse to knock me about a bit.’
    The advent of war, and an early raid on Liverpool in which a younger brother and others died when a bomb fell on the junior school shelter, brought about Jim’s final severance with formal religion, when he walked out of the requiem mass for his brother.
    ‘Couldn’t stand all that Catholic cant, but I knew there was no going back after that,’ he said, ‘And by the time she got back home from the mass I’d put together my few bits and pieces and left. I was too young to enlist, but I went along to the shipping office, lied about my age, and got a berth on a ship leaving for the States. They weren’t asking too many questions about age for the merchant fleet, and that’s where I stayed for the rest of the war.’
    ‘That must have been a hell of a culture shock for a teenager,’ said Jack. ‘How old were you then sixteen, seventeen?’
    ‘There or there abouts,’ said Jimmy. ‘And yes it was. I went in just in time to catch the U-boats’ happy time on the North Atlantic. At first I was scared witless, frightened to sleep at night, but after a while you get to accept it, though it’s always there as a nagging thought when you’re not busy. I was lucky though in bunking up and messing with a pretty good crowd. I learned a lot from one or two of them. Introduced me to a few books the Catholic fathers wouldn’t approve. Politics and social comment I mean, not smut’
    Celia was serving in Bristol when Jimmy’s ship put in there in 1944. They met at a dance and enjoyed each other’s company, met again the following evening, and kept in touch afterwards, meeting whenever they could when Jimmy’s ship was back in the UK.
    ‘We realised early on that we were two of a kind,’ Celia told them, ‘And eventually he had his wicked way with me … You probably know what it was like in wartime.’
    ‘Only by report,’ said Kate. ‘We were both a touch too young, but it all sounds eminently sensible to me. Not sure it was all that different when our time came though… But not so intense perhaps.’ Celia had the feeling that there was a note of regret there, but the moment was soon gone, and she couldn’t be sure.
    With the war over, they said, they snuggled down together like every conventional couple, apart from tying the knot formally. Jim got a job that gave him some training and good experience with electrical work, plumbing and carpentry. Celia went on a secretarial course, and studied weaving and painting at evening classes, but that phase of their life only lasted a little over three years. After all the stresses and noise of the war both felt they wanted to get completely away from it all and try something out of the ordinary.
    ‘Ended up going over the top rather, and taking on a croft in North Uist,’ said Celia.
    ‘We must have been raving,’ said Jim. ‘It was a ravishing spot we found though. Wildly beautiful