A Whisper to the Living Read Online Free PDF Page B

bitter tears for him in the privacy of the air-raid shelter. When my tears were dried, I took the scooter and the skipping rope down the back street and flung them onto the Emmanuel Street bombsite. The dolls’ house followed suit, but it looked incongruous sitting among the dust and rubble of ruined homes, so I picked up a half-brick and destroyed it as efficiently as the German bombers had wiped out the real houses that once stood there.
    At the end of my destructiveness, I felt exhausted but victorious. One battle at a time. If I won enough skirmishes, I would surely win the war.
    The real war broke out, of course, after the wedding. Considering our impoverished state (since Eddie Higson was still unfit for work) and taking into account the post-war shortages, it was a lavish affair. The reception was to be held in my grandfather’s house, which was a large one, in the centre of a high terrace on Vista Street at the top of Daubhill. The street was aptly named, because from my grandfather’s house you could see for miles across the moors surrounding Bolton. We had even had a grand view of Manchester as it burned after one massive raid, three or four sets of cousins pressed against the upstairs windows marvelling at the orange brightness of the night sky.
    The wedding took place at All Saints in August 1946. The church was filled to bursting with aunts, uncles, cousins and friends of my mother from the mill. Higson seemed to have no friends. His two brothers and their wives and offspring were in evidence, but apart from them, he had few supporters.
    My mother had decided against bridesmaids, knowing full well that I would be, at best, an unwilling participant and that my absence from such an entourage would attract comment and cause embarrassment.
    In fact, I did not really attend the service, escaping early on to a small side pew next to a confessional box, where I busied myself studying a spider that was carefully constructing a web across a corner of the door. This was Saturday. By Wednesday night the web would be in ruins when the first sinner would cross the confessional threshold at seven o’clock.
    I wore a silly pink satin frock with smocking on the bodice and a wide sash that kept coming loose and trailing on the floor. On my feet I had black patent ankle-strap shoes which had cost, so I had been informed, an arm, a leg and a cartload of coupons.
    My mother was dressed in powder blue crepe and wore a hat with a small open-weave veil. She looked pretty, but rather like a fragile china doll with her painted rose-bud lips and pink-rouged cheeks.
    Higson looked clean, at least, though rather uncomfortable in his greenish-grey suit with the wilting carnation hanging from a button hole. But then, I thought, no self-respecting flower would survive long in such unsavoury company. His hair, usually crinkly and springy, was plastered flat to his head with a liberal application of grease. There were some improvements – even I had to admit that, because he didn’t really look like something off a pirate’s flag now. The face was rounder and fuller, the skin a more acceptable colour. But nothing would ever improve that nose, nasty black bristles poking out of the nostrils, the whole thing hooked like the beak of some flesh-eating bird. He was, in my opinion, a very ugly man.
    I would not smile for the photographs. My mother, gritting her teeth and trying to hang on to her patience on this happy day, rubbed at my scuffed shoes with her wisp of a handkerchief and told me to smile, for goodness sake. There was nothing to smile about, so I carried on frowning and dragging my toes in the dust.
    As most of my relations, including my mother’s father, were Irish, a small ceilidh band had been engaged and my grandfather’s large front room had been emptied for the dancing.
    I had just one interesting cousin called Eileen. Her father, Paddy Foley, had deserted Eileen and her mother two years previously, so I had, of late, come