‘So, now you know,’ she said. ‘You did your work well at Christmas.’

  ‘Christmas!’ But it had to be Christmas. It was July now and he hadn’t touched Rosie since. ‘You’ll be almost seven months?’

  ‘Aye, well done,’ Rosie said. ‘I can count to nine too, but I’ll never carry the child that far, nor do I want to any more. I don’t want this child. I feel nothing for it.’

  Danny looked at Rosie and saw her fear and understood it. God, if the child were to die…But she’d never carried a child so far, except for Bernadette, and he began to hope. Maybe even if the doctor was right and Rosie had been poisoned by the sulphur at the munitions works, it had worked its way out of her system now.

  So he said gently, ‘It’s part of us, Rosie. You must feel something.’

  But the memory of that dreadful fear-filled night still sickened Rosie and she spat back, ‘Aye I do feel something. Revulsion, not for the baby, but for the way it was conceived. There was no love there, just carnal, alcohol-riddled lust.’

  She felt sorry for her harsh words when she looked at Danny and saw the guilt and shame on his face. ‘Rosie, please forgive me that one lapse,’ he said. ‘I’ve never had the least desire to hurt you and I wouldn’t have done so that night if I had been in my right mind. If I could turn the clock back I would. I had no idea that there had been repercussions.’

  Rosie sighed. ‘I know you didn’t,’ she said more softly, and then in an effort to get Danny to understand she went on, ‘Each time I have lost a baby, I die a little and I’m frightened that this time there will be nothing of me left and that I won’t want to go on anymore.’

  Danny felt sickened by what he put Rosie through and he drew her gently into his arms. ‘What can I do?’ he asked helplessly.

  ‘Nothing,’ Rosie answered. ‘That’s the terrible thing, no-one can do anything.’

  ‘She’ll come around when it’s born, don’t fret,’ Rita told Danny when he’d been driven to ask her advice.

  ‘She won’t talk to me,’ Danny said. ‘I know what I did on Christmas Eve hurt her and upset her; I let her down, I’ve admitted it and said I’m sorry time and again, but she can neither forget nor forgive.’

  And Rosie couldn’t. In fact she didn’t think much about Danny at all. Father Chattaway said a child was a gift from God. Some bloody gift that he snatched back before they’d taken their first breath of air, she thought. And now he’d given her another gift that she had no feelings for.

  And despite the reassuring words spoken to Danny, Rita and Ida were desperately worried over Rosie as one day slid into the next. Her eyes looked almost vacant and softened only when they alighted on Bernadette. ‘Have you thought of any names yet?’ Rita asked one day.

  ‘Names?’ Rosie repeated, her brow puckered in puzzlement. ‘What names?’

  ‘Names for the baby,’ Rita snapped irritably. ‘Wake up, Rosie, for God’s sake.’

  ‘I am awake, very awake, thank you,’ Rosie said. ‘And I have no names for this child. Don’t you understand anything?’

  They did understand in a way. ‘I have a feeling she isn’t herself,’ Ida said. ‘She’s sort of ill. She may get over it when the child’s born.’

  ‘She might,’ Rita said. ‘And yet, oh God, if the child is to die, maybe this is the only way she’ll be able to deal with it.’

  Danny, feeling unwelcome in his own home, spent any free time away from it, usually accompanied by his daughter. But, with the school holidays in full swing, if he took Bernadette to the park he often had half the kids in the neighbourhood tagging along too. Their mothers were only too glad to get them from under their feet and away from the dirt and grime of the yard or street, and they would pack them bread smeared with jam and bottles of cold tea to keep body and soul together and wave them off cheerfully.

  Danny didn’t mind. The children were company for Bernadette, and if anyone had hold of a pig’s bladder for use as a ball he could have a knockabout with some of the boys. He never took an army with him when he went down the cut, though. Lots of young children and deep scummy water didn’t mix in his opinion, and he always kept a tight grip of Bernadette’s hand.

  After the Christmas debacle he’d returned sheepishly in the New Year. ‘I’d just like to say sorry,’ he said to Ted. ‘Made a bit of a fool of myself Christmas Eve.’

  ‘Not at all, man,’ Ted said cheerfully. ‘Happens to the best of us. Mind, I bet your missus was mad. She looked fit to burst. Then, what am I talking about? If I’d gone home in a state like that, my old lady would have laid me out with a rolling pin.

  ‘’Course, funny creatures, women. My old woman can get like a raging bull over nothing at all. Or else she near drowns me with floods of tears. Mind you, the old girl’s not the worst and she was proper cut-up about our Len.

  ‘She’d have loved a little girl like yours, always had a hankering, and yet after Syd there was nothing. Funny thing, life, some families have half a dozen or more but we just had the two, and now with Len gone there’s only Syd and you know him, never stops carping and complaining. Len, now, was a proper boatie, and Syd, I brought up the same way and yet not liking the life at all. I tell you, Danny, kids would tear the very heart out of you. Wants his head examining, young Syd, because as I said, it’s a living and that’s more than a lot of poor souls have these days.’

  ‘You can say that again,’ Danny said fervently. He was glad, though, that Ted didn’t seem to think any the less of him for the state he’d got into on Christmas Eve, for he knew without the canal people he would be more lonely and dispirited than he was. The canal and it’s people was a favourite with Bernadette too, and Ted’s wife Mabel in particular loved to see her.

  Mabel always had a little treat for Bernadette and few enough treats came her way for Danny to complain about it and she would watch her fondly and told Danny how very lucky he was. ‘God, I would have given my eye teeth for a wee girl like that,’ she said one day and added, ‘Funny thing, life. There’s some boats chock-a-block full of children, families of eight and ten. God alone knows where some of them sleep. But me and Ted just had the two lads and now Len is dead and gone. Daughters are more attached to their homes somehow. It’s what they say ain’t it – “a son’s a son till he gets him a wife and a daughter’s a daughter for all, of her life”. It’s true and all, that is.’

  Bernadette loved Mabel. She was like a substitute grandmother. She liked best to go aboard the narrow boat and Mabel liked nothing better than showing her round, delighted at her preoccupation with how the beds and tables were hidden away and so small it was like a house for a child to play in. Not that Bernadette ever played much in there but sometimes she helped Mabel make cakes or biscuits that she’d later eat, warm from the oven.

  Ted told Danny the child was a godsend. ‘Poor old girl weren’t right over Len when Syd took off,’ he said, ‘and that really shook her, being the only one left, like. She was proper down, she were, and your little’un has put the spring back in her step again, right and proper.’

  Danny was glad he was pleasing someone for he hadn’t a clue how to please Rosie these days. With each passing day she became more nervous and fearful and Danny knew it was those feelings that caused her to snap and lash out at him and yet it was hard to take. Had Ted but known it, the canal and the boaties, and in particular the Masons, were a godsend to Danny too.

  Danny wanted to at least tell his mother about the baby, but Rosie would have none of it. He could have defied her, but he didn’t dare make the situation between them any worse than it was already, and anyway, he could understand her caution.

  She never discussed the subject. She knitted nothing for the coming child either, though she would buy bedraggled woollies from the rag market if she had the few coppers needed and she’d unravel them and knit a jumper for Bernadette, or sew colourful squares together to make an extra blanket for her bed in the winter. But for the baby she made no preparation.

  Danny told himself not to worry. Surely it would work itself out. In the meantime, he had plenty of things to fret over. He had another assessment in two weeks’ time. Each one made him nervous, for he was aware that the people behind the desk looked at him as if he’d crawled from under a stone, and that they held the survival of his family in the palm of their hands.

  In their attitude too, and the way they spoke, they stripped a person of any shred of self-esteem they might have the audacity still to have. They always made the decision that they would continue to pay unemployment pay grudgingly. Danny felt ashamed and humiliated as he picked up his weekly handout from the Government. He’d be willing to do any job rather than take it, but there were no jobs to be had.

  When Rosie ever let herself think of the birth of the child, she estimated it should be due in September any time from the middle onwards, and by mid-August she marvelled that this child had hung on for so long. Didn’t mean it would survive of course, and she wished she’d miscarried it earlier. It was only her stubborn determination that prevented her from having a faint hope of giving birth to a living child.

  On Wednesday, 18th August, Rosie was alone in the house when she felt the first twinges. She wasn’t alarmed at first, estimating it would take some time before she’d have to call anyone. Rita was at work, but by the time she might be needed, Ida would surely be back from Cannon Hill Park where she had taken all the kids that wanted to go. ‘Your Danny has done his share of minding the nippers this holiday,’ she told Rosie. ‘And God knows, they’ll be cooped up long enough at school soon. A bit of fresh air might do me some good as well, and it will give you a chance to put your feet up.’

  ‘If you’re sure?’

  ‘Course I am. Where’s your Danny today anyway?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Off to some rally or other, for all the bloody good it will do,’ Rosie said without enthusiasm. ‘He comes home and tells me proudly he’s walked everywhere to save the tram fare and I have to use the saved tram fare and more to have his boots soled.’

  ‘Pity you don’t get yours done at the same time,’ Ida said.

  ‘I haven’t the money,’ Rosie replied testily. ‘Bernadette needed new boots for school, the other ones pinched her feet, and anyway they’d been cobbled so often there was nothing left of them.’

  Ida said nothing. She knew few children got new boots, but Rosie thought nothing too good for her daughter. Rosie had seen enough barefoot, ragged children about the doors, their begrimed feet blue with cold and shivering in their thin, threadbare clothes. She’d rather do without food and walk barefoot herself than bring that fate on Bernadette.

  However, she had no objection to Ida taking her out and was glad her daughter was well out of the way when the griping pains became stronger. She had thought she didn’t want anyone near her when her contractions started, none to notice her shame when yet another child was stillborn, yet she thought now, as she prepared the bed for herself, she’d value company.

  But there was no-one about and so she went back downstairs and waited as the contractions grew stronger.

  She remembered Ida telling her about the woman who lived in Upper Thomas Street who’d helped out at numerous births and she wondered now if she should fetch her, in case Ida wasn’t back. She’d never spoken to her herself, though she knew the woman and knew she lived at number 59. She sank down on a chair suddenly as another pain took hold of her, clutching her stomach protectively, and felt the familiar stickiness and saw the blood staining her bloomers.

  The pain intensified quite suddenly and as one contraction followed another, Rosie moaned in agony. She knew she needed help and panic clawed at her as she struggled up to her feet intent on getting to the street and maybe sending a child for the woman.

  The room spun and tilted as Rosie stood holding on to the mantelshelf. She waited anxiously for her head to stop spinning, knowing she had to get help before another pain could overwhelm her. But even as she thought this, the rush of water took her unawares, and as the next pain began she felt a blackness descend on her. She didn’t feel herself falling onto the sodden rug before the range, nor the crack of her head as it smacked into the fender.

  She was semi-roused from her unconscious state by the contractions and she shuddered with the pain of it and then sank back into oblivion. And that is what Rita saw as she popped in to see Rosie on her way home from work.

  Rita thought at first she was dead and sprang across the room just as another contraction began. Then she saw Rosie’s face grimace in pain and the trembling of her limbs and knew what was happening.

  But what had rendered her unconscious? ‘Rosie,’ she cried, shaking her gently, and then she saw the cut on her head and the blood seeping from it onto the floor. ‘Dear Almighty Christ,’ she cried, sinking to her knees over the inert form. The floor and rag rug were soaking and she knew if Rosie was to get through this she needed help and fast.

  She raced up the entry and looked up and down the street. A group of little boys were playing marbles in the gutter and she pulled on the sleeve of the eldest one, who was about eight. ‘D’you want to earn tuppence?’ The boy’s eyes widened. ‘Yeah, missus,’ he said, thinking, who wouldn’t?

  ‘You need to go and get the doctor,’ she said. ‘He’ll probably be at his surgery in the Lichfield Road. Doctor Patterson, you know him?’

  The boy nodded. ‘My ma had to have him when our Maggie, Colin and Dougie was dying of TB.’

  Of course, Rita hadn’t recognised the boy, but she knew him as one of the Murrays. The whole area had supported the boy’s mother when she had had three of her children die of TB the previous year, and her a widow after her man had been killed at Wipers in 1915. It had been a tragedy, and yet if she didn’t soon get help, Rosie might add to the death toll of the street. She said to the child, ‘If he is out, ask where he is, you understand?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Tell him Rosie Walsh has need of him. Say she is having her baby and she’s in trouble. Can you do that?’

  ‘’Course I can, missus.’

  Rita opened her purse. She had two pennies in her hand, but she dropped them back and extracted a silver sixpence instead. The boy’s eyes opened wide in disbelief as Rita pressed the coin into his hand. ‘A tanner,’ he breathed. He’d never had a tanner in the whole of his young life and already he was wondering whether he should buy a little treat for his mother to take the sadness from her eyes for a minute, or give the whole sixpence into her hand. But that was a decision he could make later. ‘Don’t you worry, missus, I’ll bring the doctor,’ he told Rita firmly. ‘I’ll find him wherever he is and make him come.’

  Rita returned to Rosie. She had to get her more comfortable and at least try and ease the rug from beneath her. But when she returned it was to see Rosie twisting her head from side to side, her face contorted in pain, though her eyes were still shut. Rita was afraid to do anything that might add to her distress. Instead, she positioned herself at her head and took one of her cold hands in hers and began to stroke it gently. ‘Come on, Rosie. Hold on there. You’ll be fine, the doctor will be here in a minute,’ she said over and over.

  Doctor Patterson was on his rounds of the back-to-back houses when he was accosted by the little boy. While everybody about knew Rosie Walsh was pregnant, they also knew she’d actually told few people and didn’t want to discuss it, and could quite understand that after losing two babbies. Doctor Patterson had no idea she was even expecting. He’d had no occasion to visit the street or neighbouring courts for some months and so hadn’t caught sight of Rosie, so he said to the child, ‘Rosie Walsh? Are you sure that was the name?’ For there were other women he knew to be near their time.

  ‘That’s what her said,’ the boy stated. ‘Rosie Walsh, and her said she were in trouble and needs you like and quick.’

  ‘I’m on my way,’ Doctor Patterson said.

  The boy ran beside him as they hurried along, as if to assure himself the doctor would go straight to the Walshes’. The doctor wondered how far gone Rosie was this time and if she’d give birth to another dead baby. Christ Almighty, life was a bugger all right.

  The husband must be an insensitive brute to put her through this again, he thought. He barely remembered when he’d last touched his wife intimately and at times he burned with frustration, but Rosie’s husband must have known what he was doing and what she would go through. The times he’d met Rosie, he’d liked and admired her.

  So when he saw her laid out comatose on the saturated floor with blood still trickling from a head wound and her face contorted in pain, he thought for a moment he might have been sent for too late.

  ‘She’s in a bad way, isn’t she?’ Rita said after the doctor’s brief examination.

  He nodded. ‘She needs to go to hospital,’ he said. ‘I’d feel happier. Don’t worry, I’ll go along with her. Can you stay with her a while, while I arrange it?’

  ‘As long as you like,’ Rita said.

  Doctor Patterson raced up the entry to where the boy still stood. ‘Can you go down to the surgery?’ he said. ‘Tell the woman behind the desk to telephone for an ambulance to come here. Can you do that?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Here’s sixpence for your trouble,’ Doctor Patterson said, drawing it from his pocket.

  The boy, who would have walked across hot coals for half as much, thought this an easy way to make money. He supposed he was sorry Rosie Walsh was sick and all, but his mam always said not to look a gift horse in the mouth, and so he pocketed the money, hearing it jangle against the tanner already there, and began to run.

  ‘How is she, Doctor?’ Danny asked Doctor Patterson, leaping from the hard bench where he’d sat for hours supported by Rita and Ida. Doctor Patterson, who’d also hung about in the hospital for some time, heedless of the patients probably waiting for him at evening surgery, looked at Danny in distaste. Here was the brute who’d put Rosie through this. ‘Your wife is very poorly indeed,’ he said. ‘She has had to have a caesarean section, but is now out of immediate danger, and you have a son.’