Wing and a Prayer, A

ONE

1990

The phone rang just as Helen was putting on her jacket, ready to dash out to the car and drive to the pub where she worked a few evenings each week. She was often last minute; a few more seconds and she would have gone. She was tempted to ignore it, but it might be important. It might even be Alex … but that was very unlikely.

‘Hello,’ she said, somewhat impatiently, as she picked up the phone from the small table in the hall.

‘Hello, Helen … It’s Mum.’

‘I’m just on my way to work, Mum, and I’m running late. What is it? Can’t it wait?’

‘I’m sorry, love. I knew you’d be dashing off about this time, but I’m afraid I have some bad news.’

Helen felt the blood drain from her face. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s Aunt Alice. She’s had a heart attack. I’m sorry, love … I’m afraid she’s gone. It was so very sudden.’

Helen felt her eyes fill with tears, and she sat down on the chair at the side of the table. ‘Oh, no! How dreadful! But she wasn’t ill. She was perfectly all right the last time I saw her, about ten days ago. Does Gran know?’

‘Yes, it was your gran who phoned to tell me. Alice’s next-door neighbour was concerned because there were two bottles of milk on the doorstep and Trixie was miaowing outside. The back door was open so Nora was able to get in … and she found her; in the fireside chair, just as though she was asleep.’

Helen felt the tears running down her cheeks. ‘Oh … how very sad. I can’t believe it. You say she’d had a heart attack?’

‘Yes, apparently so, but there will have to be a post-mortem. She hadn’t been ill – well, not ill enough to go to the doctor. Nora rang for the doctor at once, of course, and that was what he diagnosed: a sudden massive heart attack. He called for an ambulance, and it’s all under control. But your gran and I will be going over there tomorrow. Your gran’s her next of kin – she’s her only sister – so we’ll have to go and see to things; the funeral and everything, you know.’

‘She wasn’t very old, was she?’

‘No, only seventy-one. Not old by today’s standards. Your gran’s seven years older than Alice, and still hale and hearty, but you just never know … Anyway, I’m sorry to give you such bad news. You were always Alice’s favourite, you know. And, of course, she never had any children of her own.’

‘Never even got married, did she? I often wondered why that was, Mum?’

‘Oh, lots of reasons I suppose, love. Your gran would never say much about her. There was something of a rift between them after Aunt Alice went back to live in Yorkshire. But, like I say, she’s her next of kin.’

‘Would you like me to drive you over there, Mum? I could get some time off work.’

‘No thanks, love. I’m quite a capable driver, and I’m my own boss; I don’t have to ask for time off work. And your dad will be fine on his own for a few days.’

‘Look, Mum, I’d better go,’ Helen said. ‘I’m late already. Ring me when you get to Yorkshire and let me know what’s happening. I can’t take it in yet about Aunt Alice … I shall miss her so much.’

‘We all will, love, but I know how close you were to her. Bye for now. Drive carefully … or might it be better if you didn’t go to the pub tonight?’

‘No, I’ll have to go. Don’t worry; I’ll be careful. Bye, Mum, and take care of Gran.’

‘Will do. Bye, love …’

Helen brushed the tears from her cheeks, picked up her car keys and went out to where her red Volkswagen was parked outside her ground-floor flat. Not a new car, but not very old either. It was a 1987 model, three years old, that she had bought a few months ago when she'd received a pay rise. She was saving up for a deposit to buy a flat of her own, but she felt that the car was a small luxury that she deserved. She would have her own place all in good time, and she was quite happy where she was at the moment, in a tree-lined avenue near Stanley Park. It wasn’t too far from the estate agency where she worked during the day, on Whitegate Drive, one of the main roads leading out of Blackpool.

Helen Burnside was thirty-three years old, unmarried – although she had not been short of boyfriends, one or two of whom she had thought might even be ‘the one’. She was on her own again now, having parted from Alex Barker two weeks previously. It had not been working out, and they had decided to call it a day. Helen was now having slight regrets, but she was damned if she was going to admit it. He must make the first move if he was so inclined. If not, then she would move forward. In the paraphrased words of a song from one of her favourite musicals, Oklahoma!, many a new day would dawn before she looked back at the romance behind her.

It was only a few minutes’ drive to the Wayside Inn in nearby Marton, where she worked three nights a week and occasional weekends, to supplement her savings towards a home of her own.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ she called after parking her car in the car park, which was not too busy early in the evening. ‘Mum rang just as I was coming out. It was bad news, actually, so I had to stop and talk to her for a few minutes.’ She was talking to Betty Ainsworth as she was taking off her jacket in the family room behind the bar.

‘Don’t rush,’ said Betty. ‘I can see you’re upset, and we’re not busy at the moment. Sit down and tell me about it. Has … has someone died?’

Helen sat down on the settee and Betty sat beside her. ‘Yes,’ answered Helen. ‘My Aunt Alice has died, very suddenly; it was a heart attack. She’s my great-aunt, actually, my mother’s aunt, but I’ve been very close to her, especially these last few years. She had a hip replacement about three years ago, and I went over to Yorkshire to look after her for a while. I was between jobs at the time, and it seemed to be the obvious solution for me to go and stay there. She insisted that she should pay me, because she would have needed a carer otherwise. And it worked very well. I was sorry, in a way, to leave Yorkshire to come back home, but we’ve been in close contact ever since.’

‘You say this happened suddenly? She hadn’t been ill?’

‘Apparently not. She recovered well after the hip operation. She lived on her own, but she was very independent and very fit, so it’s a tremendous shock.’

‘Whereabouts in Yorkshire did she live? I know it’s a very big county.’

‘She lives … lived … in a little village called Thornbeck, on the road between Pickering and Scarborough. She’d lived in Yorkshire since the early fifties, a few years before I was born. It was a bit of a mystery why she left Blackpool. No one seems to want to talk about it. My mother never says much, but maybe she doesn’t know much about it. Aunt Alice made a life for herself over there. She had her own little cottage that she rented at first and then managed to buy …’

Helen’s reminiscences were cut short when Jeff Ainsworth, the landlord, put his head round the door. ‘We’re getting busy out here. We could do with a hand when you two have finished your nattering,’ he said, but with a grin on his face.

‘Oh … I’m sorry, Jeff,’ said Helen, jumping up at once.

‘Helen has suffered a bereavement,’ said Betty quietly. ‘An aunt she was very fond of.’

‘I didn’t realize,’ said Jeff. ‘Take your time, of course, Helen. Betty and I can cope; Bob’s gone down to the cellar but he won’t be long. Just come when you’re ready.’

‘I’m OK,’ said Helen. ‘Really I am. Anyway, I’ll be better keeping busy tonight instead of sitting around and moping.’

And, indeed, she was busy throughout the evening, serving drinks and simple bar snacks – crisps, sandwiches, meat pies and sausage rolls. No cooked meals here; it was a small, homely place, popular mainly with the locals, and didn’t try to compete with the larger establishments that were opening up in the area.

Helen’s memories of her great-aunt returned, however, after she had driven home at eleven o’clock that blustery March evening.

She parked her car in its usual spot on the road outside the house. The occupants of the upstairs flat, who had been in residence there longer, had the use of the garage. Helen didn’t mind; it was easier for a quick getaway in the mornings.

Her flat was, for the moment, all she could wish for, comprising a living room that was quite spacious, a bedroom, small kitchen and bathroom. It was fully furnished, albeit in a mish-mash of styles, some dating from the thirties and others in the so-called ‘contemporary’ style that had been popular in the fifties, when the whole idea of furnishing was changing drastically after the stringencies of the wartime period. Helen had added her own personal touches – bright cushions and rugs and covers, pictures and photos, her CD player and the piano from home, as she was the only one who played.

Her accommodation was very desirable compared with many of the flats that were on offer. The rent was not cheap but she was doing well in the career that she had not exactly chosen, but in which she had found herself. She was quite careful, though not miserly with money, and the extra she was earning with her evening job was being put to one side for the time when she found a place of her own to buy.

Helen made a cup of Horlicks, which she usually found helped her get to sleep. She sat up in bed to drink it and to read the latest Inspector Wexford book by Ruth Rendell. But this time the intricacies of the plot failed to wholly engage her mind. She put it to one side and switched off the bedside lamp, then tried to compose herself for sleep.

She was trying to accept that Aunt Alice was no longer there, but it was hard to believe that such a lively and young-looking person could so suddenly be gone. Memories of her were poignant. A busy and active little lady, no more than five foot two in height, with hair that had once been golden, faded to an attractive ash blonde, and bright blue eyes that had lost none of their sparkle.

Helen knew that the Fletcher family had once lived in Yorkshire, in the mill city of Bradford, but had moved to Blackpool in 1921. It remained a mystery as to why Alice had returned there in the early fifties …

Alice was the younger daughter of Albert and Ada Fletcher. Her sister Elizabeth, always known as Lizzie, was Helen’s grandmother. Albert had served in the trenches in the First World War and, to Ada’s relief and some surprise, had returned. Alice was born in 1919, but Albert had suffered as a result of poison gas and had died in 1920, a victim of the Spanish flu epidemic that was sweeping through the country. Ada was left a widow with one-year-old Alice, and Lizzie, who was then eight years old.

Ada was not rich, but she was not poverty-stricken either. She and Albert had both worked for several years in one of the many woollen mills and had not married until they were in their mid-twenties. With the help of her parents, and with the money she had managed to save, Ada had decided to start a new life for herself and her daughters.

Blackpool was becoming known as the leading seaside resort in the north of England. Ada remembered the happy holidays she had spent there as a child, and so she decided to try her hand as a seaside landlady, as many more women were doing at the time.

She scraped together enough for a deposit on a three-storey house in the part of Blackpool known as North Shore. She worked hard, putting in long hours at the boarding house, and she expected her daughters to do the same. When they left school at fourteen, Lizzie in 1926 and Alice in 1933, they both worked alongside their mother, helping with the cooking and cleaning, and serving at the dining tables. As it was a family concern there was no need, in Ada’s opinion, to employ extra staff, except on rare occasions. Each year, before the start of the holiday season, around Easter time, the house would be given a good spring clean, from top to bottom, and at that time Ada would agree to employ a woman to help with the heavier duties of scrubbing and polishing and washing the paintwork.

Ada did not consider that her girls might want to pursue a career – or at least an occupation – outside of the boarding house as some of their school friends, whose parents were not in the holiday business, were able to do. It was true, though, that many young women found themselves in the same position as Lizzie and Alice, working for a small wage that amounted to scarcely more than pocket money. After all, they had their bed and board, and it was Ada’s view that that was sufficient.

Helen’s memories of Ada, her great-grandmother, were very vague. She had died in 1961 at the age of seventy-five, when Helen was four years old. She had seemed, in hindsight, to be a very old lady compared with Helen’s grandmother, Lizzie, who was now seventy-eight, a spry and energetic woman. But Grandma Ada, of course, had been born in the last century when Queen Victoria was on the throne, and the ideas and opinions of that generation had remained with her.

She had apparently ruled her two daughters with a rod of iron. She had been unable, however, to prevent Lizzie from marrying in 1933 when she was twenty-one. She had ‘come of age’ and no longer needed parental permission. Lizzie had married Norman Weaver, a local lad who attended the church where the Fletcher family occasionally worshipped. It was understood, though, that Lizzie would continue to work for her mother, and she and Norman would have their own private rooms in the boarding house. It was convenient, also, that Lizzie’s new husband was such a handyman. He was a painter and decorator by trade, and he soon found himself painting and wallpapering the boarding house bedrooms during the winter. But Ada, parsimonious though she could be, had to agree that he should receive the appropriate payment.

It was in one of the newly decorated bedrooms that Megan, Helen’s mother, was born in 1934. They all lived there throughout the Second World War; then in 1946 Ada finally decided that she had been a seaside landlady for long enough. She had not bargained for the houseful of RAF recruits that had been billeted there during the war years, and she did not have the heart to build up the holiday trade again. Her decision was a great relief to Lizzie as well. She was still subject to her mother’s demands and ideas, although Norman made sure that his mother-in-law did not always get her own way.

They were all in agreement, though, about the house that they bought in Bispham, in a residential area, a few miles further north of their present home. The semi-detached house was only a few minutes’ walk from the sea, something that Ada had insisted on. She had lived close to the sea all the time she had been in Blackpool but had hardly ever had time to walk along the promenade. She took a stroll there, along the cliffs when it was not too breezy, every day until she died in 1961 following an attack of flu and bronchitis.

And so Lizzie and Norman were on their own at last. Megan was now married to Arthur Burnside and they had their own semi-detached house in the same area; not too far away but, on the other hand, not too near, as Arthur remarked to Megan.

Megan was the only daughter – the only child, in fact – of Lizzie and Norman and, as such, had felt constricted at times and not allowed the same freedom as some of her school friends. Lizzie had been brought up by a mother who was born in the Victorian era and who had never lost her strait-laced outlook on life. And neither, deep down, had Lizzie. She disapproved of the goings-on of teenagers, as the youngsters of the day were being called. Lizzie was aware, too, that there was so much more she could have done, other choices she could have made, if she had not been restricted to a life spent working in a boarding house.

She was determined that Megan should have choices in her life that she herself had been denied. Megan attended the girls’ grammar school which was in itself regarded as a great achievement by her parents. Lizzie would have loved her only daughter to go to college or university and become a teacher or solicitor or something with ‘letters to her name’, but Megan resisted all attempts to persuade her to do so. Instead she left school at sixteen and started work in a bookshop in the town centre.

Reading, above all else, was her favourite pastime and this job suited her perfectly. She was promoted in a year or two from a junior assistant to a senior one and then to chief buyer. She continued in this position until 1957 when her daughter, Helen, was born and then, three years later, her son, Peter.

She had married Arthur Burnside in 1955. He was a teacher of English at a local secondary modern school and had often visited the bookshop to buy books for what was his consuming interest as well as his job. Lizzie consoled herself that even though her daughter had not become a teacher herself, she had married one.

When Megan returned to work after both their children had started school it was not to a bookshop but to a market stall. Her great friend Anne, whom she had known since their schooldays, had told her that there was a good profit to be made from second-hand books. And so, working together, they had rented a stall in a town-centre market and started in a small way. Their business had developed over the years as more and more people discovered their stall. They accepted only books that were in a good condition. Some of them, indeed, seemed almost as good as new and could be sold at a price that compared favourably with brand-new books. Others that were dog-eared or slightly soiled were sold at a bargain price.

They expanded as time went on and now sold greetings cards and items of stationery. Their hours were flexible to fit in with their domestic arrangements, and the two part-time women would fit in as and when they were required.

Megan, too, had been shocked to hear of her Aunt Alice’s death on that March day in 1990. She had known that Helen would be distressed at the news; she had been surprised but pleased at how her daughter and her aunt had become so close in recent years. It was a closeness that Megan had never really felt towards her aunt. Alice had left Blackpool to make a new home in Yorkshire and a new life for herself in the early 1950s. Megan had never known why, although she had guessed – or at least half guessed – at the reason.

Her own mother, Lizzie, had been very close-lipped about her sister’s movements. They had visited Aunt Alice in her new home a few times each year, but it was as though Lizzie had felt obliged to do so. Megan was always aware of a certain lack of warmth between her mother and her aunt. She knew there had also been animosity between her aunt and her grandmother, Ada, although this had mellowed somewhat by the time the old lady died.

Alice had been friendly enough towards Megan, who was only fifteen years her junior; but it was Helen, and later Peter, who had captured Alice’s interest and affection, Helen more so than her brother.

Megan reflected now, as she prepared to make the journey to Yorkshire the following day, that Helen would be grieving sorely at her great-aunt’s death, whereas Lizzie seemed to be taking the news of her sister’s demise in her stride, as was her way. When Megan’s father had died a few years ago Lizzie had coped with it all in her usual matter-of-fact manner. She now lived alone, facing life stoically in the way she had learned from her mother.

TWO

Helen received a phone call from her mother to say that she and Lizzie were now settled in Aunt Alice’s cottage and would stay there for the next week or so, possibly longer. They had been in touch with Alice’s solicitor and were making arrangements, along with the funeral director and the vicar of the local church, for the funeral.

Helen had been to see how her father was coping in her mother’s absence.

‘Oh, you know me, love, I’m fine,’ said Arthur Burnside. ‘I can manage on my own; cook myself a meal an’ all that. Maybe not as well as your mum, but I’m coping. I’m what you might call a modern man. What about you, though? I know Alice’s death has come as a shock to you, hasn’t it?’

‘Yes, it has,’ said Helen, ‘but I’m coming to terms with it now. I came to know her pretty well when I stayed with her, the time she had her hip operation. We chatted quite a lot about the time when she was a girl, living in the boarding house. But I felt there were certain things she was secretive about. And I didn’t pry; she had a perfect right to keep things to herself if that was what she wanted. She had made a lot of friends in the village and she was involved with the local church. She seemed to be very well liked there; there was always someone popping round to see her.’

They heard a few days later that the funeral was planned for the Wednesday of the following week; a service and burial at the church, followed by a lunch for those who wished to attend at one of the village inns.

‘I shall get a day off school,’ said Arthur. ‘Possibly two days, so I will drive you there if you like. There’s no need for us to take both cars. We’ll set off early on Wednesday morning; the drive takes about three hours. And maybe we’ll stay overnight if we don’t feel like coming back the same day. Your mum and gran are staying at Alice’s cottage, but I’m sure there’ll be room for us to squeeze in there as well.’

‘Peter and Linda will be travelling from Skipton, which is a good deal nearer,’ said Helen, ‘so they’ll go back the same day. They’re leaving the children with a neighbour.’

Helen’s brother, Peter, had been transferred to Skipton by the bank he worked for, and there he had met and married Linda. He was now aged thirty, and they had two children, a boy and a girl aged five and three respectively. Helen took no notice when people made comments that her brother was leaving her far behind. She would get married when – and if – she found the right man.

Helen dressed with care on the morning of the funeral, having risen at seven o’clock to make sure she was ready when her father came for her. She knew there was a new idea regarding a funeral service; to regard it as a celebration of the life of the deceased person rather than being sombre and sad. Sometimes the person left instructions stating they wanted their friends and family members to avoid dark clothes, but as far as she knew her aunt had not made any plans for her funeral. She had probably assumed that she would be around for several more years.

Helen knew, though, that she must stick to the more conventional dress. Her gran would be horrified if she turned up in the sort of clothes that she preferred – bright pink or red or turquoise; colours which she felt enhanced her pale complexion and fairish hair, to which she added golden highlights from time to time. She wore short skirts too, but not miniskirts, which were no longer fashionable.

She considered that the just-above-the-knee-length navy blue skirt and jacket she sometimes wore at the office would be acceptable; she did not possess any black clothes at all. With the suit she wore a white T-shirt top, and she would don a soft navy beret if it proved necessary to wear a hat in church.

Her father, too, was soberly dressed in his best charcoal-grey suit, rather than the casual attire of sports jacket and grey trousers that he wore at school.

They were on the road soon after eight o’clock, and after leaving Lancashire they took the road over Blubberhouses moor, and then via Thirsk and Helmsley to the expanse of moorland known as Sutton Bank. It was a route that Helen had taken many times before, and she loved the wild open scenery and the vastness of the sky, but this time the journey was tinged with sadness.

They arrived soon after eleven and made their way to Alice’s cottage in the centre of Thornbeck. There was a tiny stream running through the village, little more than a culvert, and the cottage was in a row of similar ones overlooking the stream. There was a minuscule front garden where crocuses were blooming and the short path led to the green painted door with its shining brass handle and letter box.

Arthur parked near the village green – there was no room in front of the cottages – and Megan, who must have been looking out for them, opened the door at once.

Helen had prepared herself for the cottage to feel strange now her aunt was no longer there, but the place still felt warm and welcoming, as though some vestige of her presence remained.

The family members gathered in the living room where a fire was burning in the grate. Alice had had central heating installed a few years ago, but a fire added warmth and cheer. Her black and white cat, Trixie,