Copyright Oggbashan August 2017
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
This is a work of fiction. The events described here are imaginary; the settings and characters are fictitious and are not intended to represent specific places or living persons.
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All our troubles started when we found the old pram. It had been pushed down the steps leading to the basement area of a demolished house. It was the early 1930s and our town was dying. Almost all the men were out of work, not that it affected us four. We didn't have men in the household. We were all bastards at a time when it was a real social stigma. Our fathers had been soldiers in the local regiment. They might have meant their promises to marry our pregnant mothers but all four men died in the mud of the 1917 battle of Third Ypres, better known as Passchendaele.
When we were babies, being bastards didn't matter. Our fathers had died in The War. So had so many fathers. We became different when we started school. We were outcasts from the start. Other children were not allowed to play with us and we were never invited to a birthday party or even to a family's home. Apart from being bastards we were poor, the poorest of the poor, when there was no help. Our mothers worked. They had to. So we four were a group thrown together. Bastards against the world, we called ourselves "The Four Bees". To anyone else we said we were "The Four".
In 1931 when we were fourteen we found the old pram. We fell on it with joy. The girls, Evie and me Dottie, thought we could play with it. The boys, Jack and Fred, wanted a soapbox cart.
We sat down and discussed it. We talked about it for a couple of days. Eventually a close inspection of our treasure showed that the bodywork was completely rotten and fell apart leaving just the wheels and chassis. So it became a soapbox cart.
All four worked on the cart in that basement. It was the only thing we owned. The friendly greengrocer gave us broken fruit boxes for the structure. The nails came from the broken boxes. The hammer was a large stone. The rope for the steering we found washed up on the beach. We couldn't paint it because paint cost money we didn't have.
All four of us had jobs when we weren't in school. The money we made helped to keep us alive but that year the jobs ended. No one could afford the few pennies that we had earned running errands, delivering greengroceries, newspaper rounds. Everything went.
We had hoped the soapbox cart would help us to earn money because we could carry heavier loads but there were no loads. We were no longer the poorest of the poor. The whole town was poor. The shipbuilding yards were empty and rusting. The milkman stopped delivering because no one could pay him. The shops closed one by one. Grass started to grow between the cobbles even on the larger roads.
We finished the cart on a Saturday. The boys pulled Evie and I around on it. That was fun for a while but what we all wanted to do was to run the cart down a hill. We trudged to the top of Castle Street and looked down the winding road to the town centre. Even on a Saturday there was very little sign of life.
Who would go first? We discussed that, as we discussed everything. We tried various combinations of loading. At last I stood aside.
"OK." I said "You two boys and Evie will fit. You three go first. When you come back I'll go with one of the boys."
I have that speech engraved on my heart. I thought I was being generous to my friends. Fred sat in front, then Jack, and Evie was at the back. Fred was steering. Jack had the brake.
They set off, increasing speed as they went. Just as they turned the corner out of view I saw Jack pulling hard on the brake. I heard the distant rumble of a tram and then a faint sound of a crash followed by distant screams.
I ran down Castle Street as fast as I could. When I turned the corner I could see the tram. It had stopped just beyond the junction. In the middle of the road was a silent crowd of people. I hurried up to it but a woman who knew my mother grabbed me.
"Don't look, Dorothy. It is not a sight for children."
"But they are my friends!" I protested.
"Come on, lass. I'll walk you home."
She did. I was numb. What had happened that I couldn't see?
I found out in the days that followed. Fred had been killed. Jack's legs were mangled under the tram, and Evie's face had been smashed.
I went to Fred's funeral. So did most of the town. There was no work so a funeral was something to do. Jack was still in hospital. Evie came in a wheelchair with her head so bandaged that only her eyes could be seen.
The town had a collection for the funeral and for Jack and Evie. Despite the Depression the money just covered the funeral and hospital expenses. If the accident had happened a couple of years later the town could not have helped.
After the accident Jack, Evie and I remained friends but things had changed. Jack always needed crutches and Evie's face was a mess. Her nose was flattened, her cheekbones concave and deep scars marred the skin.
The town remained poor until re-armament started. We three got jobs. Jack and Evie were making parachutes. I was working in a factory making rockets. As a cripple, Jack was paid at the same rate as the women. The men were usually paid more.
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In April 1939 we were all twenty-one years old. We wanted a party to celebrate. It would be the first birthday party we had ever had. We had made birthday cards for each other, and our mothers had tried to make our birthdays special but we had never had a proper present.
We were still bastards and still shunned. Evie's face and Jack's legs set them apart from other people. I felt responsible for Fred's death and their injuries. If only I had gone first. Many nights my sleep was disturbed by remorse. I woke up in a cold sweat with my last words to Fred echoing in my brain.
We returned to the demolished house again and again. We had found a way into the cellar from the back and made it our den. Since the Munich crisis we had equipped it as best we could as an air raid shelter. The rubble from the demolition was mounded over the cellar. Inside it was solidly vaulted with brick arches. It was much more solid than the surface communal shelter being built by the flats where we lived.
When he was eighteen Jack had persuaded a friendly Council officer to let the derelict site to him. Jack had said he wanted to use it as an allotment but the agreement (backed by his mother until he was twenty-one) gave Jack the site for three pence a week without limiting it to use as an allotment. We planted vegetables in what had been the back garden. Evie and I had to do the digging and heavy work. Jack scooted around on a trolley weeding and planting out the seedlings. The crop in 1938 had been a great help to all of us and we had bigger plans for 1939.
In the cellar, apart from the stock of preserved fruit and vegetables, we had a table of fruit crates, a couple of rickety chairs and a large hay filled mattress. We would sit there in the dark or with a candle end and talk for hours. The cellar was where we would have the party.
We saved a few pennies to buy the food we couldn't grow. Jack made a table from driftwood. Evie and I made a tablecloth from scraps of parachute material. Then I had some luck. On the way back from an evening shift I saw a sailor being arrested for being drunk and disorderly. He had a whole bottle of rum that he was trying to open. The police told him to pour it away but he objected to the waste and was fighting to protect it.
"It is real Navy Rum, you know!" he kept shouting.
As I passed he saw me.
"I'd rather give it to the young lady." He said. "I'll go quietly if she'll take it. It is too good to be wasted."
The policemen were getting tired of fighting him.
"Would you?" one asked.
"Yes, of course," I replied.
