Walking Back to Happiness. Anne Bennett

Paddy had promised.

      ‘Was Mammy upset when you left?’ Josie asked, jolting Hannah back to the present.

      ‘Very. I was sad too. God, it was a wrench to go. People said I was ungrateful to leave when I could have been such a help to Frances at long last. Frances never said that and I doubt she ever thought of it, she wasn’t like that. She said she’d miss me so much, but she wished me Godspeed. It broke me up and we cried together as we hugged, and for a while, my resolve weakened. It was your father who said to go and satisfy myself and to remember I had a home to come back to if it didn’t work out.

      ‘Not everyone saw it like that of course, but then all my life people have been telling me how grateful I should be to Frances and I was grateful to her. But that level of gratitude gets to be a heavy burden when you’re reminded of it constantly. Not that your parents ever spoke about it, it was others, the relatives who hadn’t wanted me themselves, or neighbours who felt justified to speak as they chose because they’d known me all my life.’

      ‘And did you like it in this Leeds place?’ Josie asked.

      ‘I did not and that’s the truth,’ Hannah said, remembering her horror at the grim greyness of the place and how the opulence of the hotel unnerved her and the way she could barely understand the way the other girls spoke. She was achingly lonely and many, many times thought she’d made a mistake because she missed her family so very much. She missed the farm too and often longed for the sight of a green mossy hill, springy turf beneath her feet, and good clean air to fill her lungs with.

      ‘I didn’t mind the work,’ she said. ‘I was well used to work, but everything was so strange and when Molly got married and moved to London only months after I arrived, it was worse. We wrote for a while, but in the end the letters petered out. A girl called Tilly Galston shared my room then.’

      ‘Was she nice?’

      Hannah smiled as she remembered the good friend she’d been and the way she pulled her out of the morose self-pitying attitude she’d been in danger of developing. ‘I’d have gone home if it hadn’t been for her,’ Hannah said. ‘She wouldn’t let me.’

      ‘How could she stop you?’

      ‘Oh, she was very bossy,’ Hannah said. ‘But funny too, you know. She could always see the bright side of things and could always make me laugh. She bullied me into going out and about too and making an effort with the other girls. We were good friends.’

      ‘Where is she now?’

      Hannah shrugged. ‘Still in Leeds, I suppose,’ she said. ‘At least she was there when I left and moved to Birmingham.’

      ‘Don’t you know?’

      ‘Well, no I don’t exactly.’

      Josie made a face. She felt Hannah was a poor friend to not keep in touch with Tilly, but she wasn’t about to argue the point. Tilly was in the past and it was the future she was worried about. She wondered if Hannah wanted to take her back to live with her. Maybe she was against the idea, too, and it had been forced upon her. Maybe it was gratitude rearing its ugly head again and suddenly she felt a bit sorry for her aunt. ‘All right then,’ she said in an effort towards compromise. ‘Say I do come with you, where do you live in this Birmingham place?’

      Hannah knew Josie was putting a brave face on it and replied, ‘An area called Erdington to the north of the city. Many call it Erdington Village, which it was once, but now it’s like a little town. It’s not anything like here. You’ve never seen so many people and cars and buses, lorries and trams on the roads, especially in the city centre. But the guesthouse, where I work, is in Grange Road and that’s not a bit like that. It’s lovely. It’s wide and tree-lined and the houses are set back behind privet hedges. There’s even a small farm in Holly Lane, not that far away, and sometimes we can get hens’ or ducks’ eggs from the farmer, Mr Freer.’

      She stole a glance at Josie and went on, ‘I suppose living here you’re thinking, “So what?” Believe me, if you’d been subjected to the rationing restrictions Britain has had to put up with, you’d know how wonderful getting the odd egg is. I’ve had a word with Mrs Emmerson and she doesn’t mind in the least putting you up for a while. She’s very kind and anyway, I’ll be getting married in September.’

      Married! That gave Josie a jolt. She thought Hannah would have given up all thoughts of marriage. She was old, almost as old as Miriam, and she’d been married for years and years and had a whole tribe of children now, though no one seemed pleased about that either. Still, that wasn’t her problem. What was, though, was the man Hannah was to marry. ‘Does Mammy know that?’ she asked.

      ‘Aye, she does,’ Hannah said. ‘We talked about it. He has a largish terraced house of his own. There’d be plenty of room for you in it.’

      ‘And how does he feel about me?’

      Hannah crushed down the worry she had about that and the less than welcoming letter she’d received just that day in answer to hers that she’d written, telling her fiancé what her sister had asked her to do. He’d written that he didn’t want to take on the responsibility of a child and he’d been surprised at her making a decision without consulting him. It was, he’d said, no way to start married life.

      Hannah would win him round, she had to, but now Josie needed reassurance. ‘He’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘Haven’t I told you about the size of the house? Why would he mind you sharing a wee piece of it? He knows it’s the right thing to do and Mr Bradley always does the right thing.’

      Josie stared at Hannah. ‘Mr Bradley!’ she said incredulously. ‘Hasn’t he a first name? You don’t call a man you’re marrying “Mr”.’

      But it was how Hannah thought of him. Solid, rather dull Mr Bradley – Arthur Bradley – the one Gloria Emmerson told Hannah she must grab before someone else did. He was her stab, perhaps her only stab, towards respectability.

      Not of course that Mr Bradley knew anything about Hannah’s past. Oh dear me no, that would never have done. But Gloria knew and she liked Hannah and wanted the best for her.

      That’s why she found her a job in her thriving guesthouse and then latched on to Mr Bradley, a commercial traveller, who’d confided in her that he was sick of the road. ‘To rise in the firm though,’ he’d said dolefully, ‘I need a wife. The boss thinks married men are more steady and reliable.’

      If Gloria thought Arthur Bradley was just about the steadiest person she’d ever met, she gave no indication of it. ‘But,’ Arthur had gone on, ‘I don’t want to marry and anyway, I’ve nothing to offer a wife. The house went with my father’s job, you see. After he died, Mother had the house during her lifetime, but when she died it went back to the firm. So I don’t even have a permanent place to live.’

      That had all changed a little later when out of the blue, Arthur inherited a large terraced house in Harrison Road, Erdington, after the demise of an elderly uncle. Gloria immediately began to think of him as a suitable catch for Hannah. First, though, she had to win Hannah round to her way of thinking, for she’d shown no interest in any men in the time she’d known her.

      Hannah wasn’t the least bit interested in Arthur Bradley either. She felt sorry for him at times but didn’t really know why. He seemed a lonely sort of man, out of step with the rest of the world somehow. Gloria said it was because he’d lived all those years with his mother. ‘How many years?’ Hannah asked. ‘He’s not that old.’

      ‘I’d have said he was going on for forty.’

      Hannah was surprised. ‘Do you think he’s that old?’ she asked. ‘Was he in the war?’

      ‘No,’ Gloria said. ‘He had flat feet or some such he told me. Anyway, it doesn’t bother you him being so much older than you, does it? I mean, he doesn’t look his age.’

      He didn’t, Hannah had to admit that. Despite Arthur Bradley’s thinning brown hair and the wire-framed glasses