Daisy's Wars Read online

  Michael, the youngest, was the last to marry and leave home, and the day after the wedding Clare had declared that now she had done her duty, she was off. Without saying a word to anyone she had already booked her passage on a boat to America, her packing was done, and when she left she said firmly that she would not be coming back.

  There was general shock within the family. It was all very well to say Michael was off her hands, but she was the official mother figure and never likely now to have any children of her own, so she should take her part in looking after her brothers’ offspring. Besides, there was her father – she couldn’t leave him to fend for himself.

  ‘Bugger my brothers’ children,’ Clare had replied with feeling, ‘bugger my father and bugger the rest of you if you don’t like it. I’ve done enough. I’m the wrong side of thirty and I’ve never had a life, it’s my turn now.’ And with that she left Newcastle forever.

  Typically, rather than look after himself, Granda Paddy took his books and moved back in with his elderly mother.

  Michael would tell this story in a shocked voice, hurt that any woman related to him could desert her duty. It brought disgrace on the entire family, especially as everyone in the community knew about it. The only person who did not criticise Clare in these old tales was, Daisy noted with pride, Old Niamh – and Daisy herself, of course. Every time her father recounted this terrible abandonment, Daisy cheered inside. As a small child she had been rifling through family pictures and papers in Granny Niamh’s house, where Granda Paddy still lived, and she had found an envelope with an American address on the back. Inside was a picture of Aunt Clare taken in New York, dressed in the clothes of the time, long skirt, high-necked blouse and buttoned boots. On her head was a flat hat like a pancake with the merest hint of veil that had been firmly pushed out of the way, and she had a robust bag over one arm, and clutched in both hands an umbrella. The sepia snap was too dark to be able to see Clare’s colouring, and her expression was so so severe that it made Daisy laugh out loud. It was as though she was saying, ‘Well, I’m here now, take it or leave it. If you choose to ignore this attempt to keep in touch, well, bugger you all again.’ Though the truth was that taking a picture in those days took so long that even the most determined smile would die before being captured.

  It was the only tangible link to Aunt Clare’s existence and Daisy never discovered if anyone in the family had ever replied, but she always felt that it was significant that it had been sent to Granny Niamh and Granny Niamh had kept it. So Daisy took it and kept it too, never mentioning it to anyone. If there was one thing Daisy learned from her childhood it was that women were always the practical ones, the strong ones who were relied on so that the males could wallow in their feelings. Granda Paddy, Michael and all the rest avoided, in their own ways, trying to help themselves and so never achieved anything for their families, and so it was that in due course Michael and his brothers followed Paddy down the mines. If she and Kay had been boys, Daisy was sure that they, too, would have been expected to do the same, and, as it was, going into service was regarded as the highest they could achieve if it hadn’t been for their mother, though that was accident rather than design.

  When she was young, Kathleen Clancy had been a highly-regarded singer in their community, and though Michael had worshipped her from afar as a boy, he finally met her when her brother came to work beside him. The Clancys were a musical family, every one of them played an instrument or sang, but Kathleen was the youngest of seven and therefore benefited from the fact that there were many wages coming into the house as she was growing up, giving her the opportunity to develop her talent.

  For Michael the Clancys were a revelation. ‘Everywhere you turned in their house there was music,’ he’d say. ‘They were all gifted, touched by God.’

  Daisy always let the last bit pass. Michael was her father, after all.

  ‘And there was Kathleen, so beautiful and with that glorious voice,’ he’d remember aloud, his eyes shining. ‘How could any man not love her?’

  Michael had pursued her for years, just as many other young men had, ‘until she caught me,’ he’d say with a grin, glancing at his wife. And watching the affectionate look that passed between her parents, Daisy understood that her father still saw her mother as she had been, to him she hadn’t changed at all.

  After they married Kathleen had continued with her singing, but something had happened with their first child’s arrival, or slightly before, though no one had been aware of it till afterwards. She had bloomed for the first six or seven months of her first pregnancy, then she seemed to weaken, but those last months were tiring for all women so no one worried. After the birth she never really returned to normal, though once again there were reasons: the birth had been long and punishing, besides, a new baby could exhaust anyone.

  It was Daisy’s birth two years later that had set the seal. Once again a weakness set in at six or seven months and from then on it seemed that Kathleen couldn’t catch her breath and the slightest exertion had her gasping for air. One of the pictures of her mother Daisy would carry in her mind for the rest of her life was of Kathleen on wash day, bent over a washboard, rubbing her family’s clothes up and down its corrugated metal strip, and suddenly stopping and resting her forehead on the wooden frame for support, breathless and sweating.

  On each cheek Kathleen developed a round red spot, as though she had been wearing rouge, so that she always looked so healthy, if you discounted the fact that she couldn’t breathe. It was down to some illness she had had as a child, a doctor had told Michael. It had affected her heart, and she shouldn’t have any more children.

  Michael couldn’t understand why they blamed her heart when it was obviously her lungs – he was a miner, he knew about lungs. Despite what he had been told, Michael suspected that his wife was suffering from tuberculosis, the scourge of the working classes who were forced to live so tightly packed together. In an attempt to provide her with more space to effect a cure, he had managed to rent a terraced house in Guildford Place in Heaton, a mile from Byker, in a single row of houses facing onto the railway line. It was far too big for the family, having more bedrooms than they could decorate, heat or use, but that was how Michael was, he had no balance in anything he did or thought. Kay and Daisy shared a bedroom upstairs, a step or two above the separate toilet and inside bathroom, which was a luxury, and the others lay empty.

  ‘I made sure,’ Michael would say firmly, ‘there would be no more children.’ And Daisy would nod just as firmly, though she had no idea what he meant. It would be some years before she made any connection between her mother sleeping, indeed living, in the big room at the front downstairs, and her father sleeping in the one at the back.

  There would be no more singing for Kathleen either and her brightness began to fade. She was like a candle burning down and slowly dimming, her life hovering around the last flickering of a wick, only just sustaining a glimmering of fire. The rouge-like stain stayed on her cheeks and, as her beautiful red hair lost its vibrant colour and became a dull, light brown, her lips took on a blue tinge that grew deeper the more she exerted herself.

  No one had any clear idea of what was wrong with her. There was no money for doctors or medicine because every spare penny went to promoting Kay’s career. Even if there had been, there was little any doctor of the time could have done for Kathleen anyway.

  From those years came the sound Daisy would never forget, of her mother trying to breathe – a harsh, rasping sound that would haunt her dreams. With Michael working night shift down the pit, Daisy would creep into her mother’s bedroom and ask if there was anything she could do, and Kathleen, weary-eyed, sweat glistening on her body and too breathless to reply, would give a slight shake of her head and close her eyes. Sometimes, decades after her mother was dead, Daisy would wake in the night, just as she had when she was a child, that picture in her mind as she waited in the darkness for her mother’s next tortured breath, fearful that it might not come
. Sometimes she was out of bed and on her way to her mother’s bedroom again before she realised it was just a dream.

  3

  That Kay was blessed with her mother’s looks and musical ability was a great joy to Kathleen. It gave her another chance to shine through her daughter, so that her talent had not been lost. It also gave her something to live for, which was no bad thing in itself as there was little that the medical world could have offered, and anyway, given the choice between financing Kay’s future and her own present, Kathleen would undoubtedly have chosen the former.

  From when Kay first started to sing, which was from birth if you believed her besotted parents, Kathleen had worked with her daughter as much as her health would allow. Even when she couldn’t, there was the rest of the musical Clancy clan to help. Kay would be a star, she would claim the success that Kathleen had been destined for, but she would go one step further. Kay would one day sing not only for the local Irish community but for the world.

  To enable the talented Kay to do this the entire family had to be behind her, and that meant every penny went towards her career. Michael, who was no realist himself, could refuse his wife nothing. He might not have understood his wife’s illness, but on some level he seemed to accept that it was a one-way street, so what Kathleen wanted, Kathleen must have, and Kathleen wanted her daughter to be a star.

  It was fortunate that when Daisy came along she proved to be not just plain and capable but without any sense of the music that flowed through her sister’s veins; Kay could go on singing while Daisy coped, and so she found herself drafted into the family ‘business’. It had been like that for as long as she could remember. Daisy learned to sew the dresses Kay would need for her stage work, a skill Kay herself couldn’t be expected to learn because she had to perfect her gift. Likewise, Kay couldn’t be of any help about the house or to her sick mother, because her music kept her too busy, and besides, artistes of her calibre did not have roughened hands.

  So, as Kathleen’s health gradually deteriorated, Daisy managed the household: buying groceries, cooking, washing, cleaning out and setting fires, much as Aunt Clare had done before her. Part of the burden she took on, though she never regretted it, was to nurse her mother, too, and the workload increased so gradually as she grew that she barely noticed how much she was doing. Even if she had noticed, it was just how life was. It was no one’s fault, not Daisy’s and certainly not Kay’s, and she knew her sister had been given no more choice in these arrangements than she had herself. Their lives were, as the lives of all children were, driven by adults; they simply conformed.

  Indeed, deep down Daisy felt sorry for her sister. She was far from sure that Kay got any pleasure from her music. The whole drive was to put her in a position to exploit it, and that didn’t necessarily mean she should enjoy it. There wasn’t a free moment, from piano lessons to singing lessons, rehearsals, auditions, dress fittings and performances. It was a life Daisy would never have wanted for herself and, if anything, she was awed by her sister’s ability to stand before audiences, however adoring, and perform. Daisy knew she could never do that.

  The money Little Kay’s appearances brought in, plus Michael’s earnings, went back into her career, so the family had little if anything left over. But when she heard Kay sing all Daisy’s doubts disappeared. No one, she thought, could make such a beautiful sound with a voice if they didn’t love doing it. Years later, when she looked back, she wondered about her sister, though. It was as if Kay had no personality and simply went along with whatever others planned for her, not once giving an opinion, never mind disagreeing. She simply smiled that innocent smile and complied. Sometimes, remembering her sister, Daisy would wonder if there had been something wrong with her and if she had been born like that or simply conditioned. How could it be possible for anyone to be so good-natured and obedient all of her life: no tantrums, no off-days, always perfect. Could it be normal to exist as a completely blank canvas for anyone and everyone to paint their dreams on? She had envied Kay’s voice at times, but later she came to feel pity for her, because although she was there, in a way it was as if she had never actually lived.

  Daisy would work in the house when she got up in the mornings, go to school when she could and return to more chores. Then she would have to accompany her sister to her next appearance, because as time passed Kathleen’s condition worsened and she rarely moved from her bed, and Michael would be at work.

  Daisy felt no resentment, just concern over what she hadn’t had time to do because there weren’t enough hours in the day, and anxiety about how Kathleen was when she was alone at home. She wasn’t aware of it at the time but, looking back, she realised that deep in her mind had lurked the knowledge of Aunt Clare’s ‘shameful’ bolt for freedom. She would take out the secret photo and smile at the grim-looking woman clutching her umbrella as a shield, and somehow she didn’t feel trapped for eternity.

  It wasn’t as if she was forced into a life of drudgery, playing Cinderella to her beautiful sister. Everyone just pitched in to forward Kay’s career. There was always Dessie Doyle, for a start, there was no denying that, though Daisy wished she could.

  Dessie was two years older than Kay, four older than Daisy, and was Kay’s childhood sweetheart, the boy next door, the son Michael would never have, and Daisy had never liked him. He had been there as long as she could remember, just like many others in a community where neighbours were as close as family, but Dessie stood out because of his closeness to Kay. Wherever Kay was, there he was, too, sticking so close to her that she couldn’t turn round and, more importantly, so no one else could get near her. He never took any notice of Daisy – she was just plain, quiet Daisy, the fetcher and carrier. Kay was the sole focus of his attention.

  Not that Daisy objected – she was invisible to most people, especially when Kay was around – but there was something almost dismissive about Dessie’s attitude to her, as though once he appeared her presence was no longer required. All through her childhood Daisy resented him, even if she couldn’t quite work out why. After all, every male took over, there was nothing unusual in that. Like all males, too, Dessie was attracted to Kay, who was a local celebrity almost from the time she could walk onto a makeshift stage.

  Daisy didn’t trust him, that was what it was. It was that simple; even though he had never given her the slightest reason, it was just a feeling she had. Michael thought it was a simple case of jealousy, that Daisy resented her father’s affection for the boy or the boy’s attachment to Kay, but Daisy knew it wasn’t. Her dislike of him was at gut level, an instinctive distrust for no reason she could think of. She had never felt other than suspicious of him; she felt uneasy when he was around and he was around increasinly as Kay grew into her teens. Daisy should have been grateful to have someone there to take on her duties as Kay’s escort so that she could look after her mother, particularly with Kathleen’s health deteriorating. It should be a relief to know that, no matter what, there was someone to take Kay safely to and from her appearances. She just wished it could be someone other than Dessie.

  Even when Kathleen was too ill to watch her daughter perform, she was anxious to hear how the night had gone and couldn’t settle till she heard Kay arriving home with Dessie. He was totally accepted as one of the family, but as he went with Kay to Kathleen’s beside, Daisy felt a kind of drawing back from the tall, dark boy. When they were children walking to school together, she would deliberately fall behind because she didn’t want to walk in his company. Even then he was an intimidating force, at least to her: taller than all the other children, thin, dark, sallow-skinned and suspect, that was how she remembered him. He had greasy black hair falling across his forehead, giving him a shifty look as his dark eyes peered out at the world, those brown eyes so dark that they, too, looked black. At that time they were always on Kay, as most men’s eyes were.

  Dessie worked for Haggie R. Hood & Sons, a hemp and wire-rope manufacturers at Willington Quay on the Tyne, a step away from being
a collier, and his ambition and application had taken him from the physical work of the factory to the office at nearby Akenside, so that in his late teens he was working as an order clerk. This impressed everyone else and, if he had been anyone else, it would have impressed Daisy, but he was Dessie Doyle and where others saw in him a determination to better himself, she saw only a man on the make. Whatever strides forward he had made, she guessed, they were at someone else’s cost. There was no opportunity too small for Dessie to take advantage of it.

  ‘I don’t know why you can’t be civil to him,’ Kathleen chided Daisy, after Dessie had announced, shyly of course, another promotion.

  It turned Daisy’s stomach to see his modest performance, probably more than his ‘I’ll protect Kay’ one.

  ‘I don’t know either, Daisy admitted, tucking in the blankets around her mother and arranging a crocheted shawl across her shoulders. Kathleen was recovering, hopefully, from yet another bout of bronchits. ‘I think it’s the way his eyes dart about to make sure everyone knows how modest he’s being, to see if the act is going down well.’

  ‘Daisy, that’s terrible!’ Kathleen replied huskily.

  ‘But it’s true,’ Daisy laughed. ‘I don’t know how the rest of you miss it, he’s like an animal lining up his next kill, a wolf or something.’

  ‘You’re just being nasty,’ Kathleen retorted, already wheezing with the exertion of saying a few words. ‘And he’s got Kay a job in the office beside him, too, so she won’t have to do rough work in a factory or go into service being somebody’s skivvy.’

  Daisy hardly paused, but in her mind she was thinking, Like me, you mean, Mam, like me?

  They didn’t mean to be unkind, of course. She knew that, but to her family that was her place in life – Daisy the skivvy – whereas Kay was destined for greater things, even if the career plan had faltered somewhat. Time had passed and by the age of fourteen Little Kay was no longer so little. When she sang she was no longer the sweet, innocent girl in the blue dress with puff sleeves, and, even if her voice was probably better, she was in that odd stage of being neither child nor woman. It was a hard enough time for any girl, but it left Kay in a professional hiatus with bookings dropping. There were always other sweet little girls around to take her limelight, though none with her talent, it was true.