September Starlings Read online

  This made me worse. His self-control was masterful – he could even get his body to make noises, could explode to order and, furthermore, he managed an air of total nonchalance every time he broke wind. ‘Sorry,’ I mumbled. ‘It was so funny.’

  Buck Teeth chose this moment to give voice to his views on the matter. ‘It’th not funny, thomebody fartin’. It’th thometimeth theriouth, ith bad wind in the gut. Me granny were a martyr to wind, me mam thayth. Me granny thuffered all ’er life an’ at the finish, they ‘ad to thtick a tube up ’er arthe to let it out. The ‘ole thtreet were nearly gathed with it. It’th not a laughing matter.’

  The lad’s explanation nearly killed me. I wondered if it might be possible to die laughing, because the pain in my belly was acute and my lungs were starved of oxygen to the point where one of the twins said, ‘’Asn’t ’er gone a funny colour?’ That poor, unfortunate buck-toothed boy had a lisp that tickled not just my ears, but my eyes too had been suffering from hysteria. Every time he attempted an S, his tongue poked past the terrible tombstones that pretended to be teeth, and I could scarcely bear to look at him for another second. My sides ached with cruel stitches and the tears poured down my cheeks. I had never laughed like this before. It was a wonderful way of releasing tension, yet I still pitied that ugly little boy.

  ‘It’s a shame,’ said Irene or Enid (whose complete twin-ness was causing me even more uncomfortable glee). ‘’Er wants ’er muther. An’ we was just sat there in t’ church doin’ nowt.’

  The other twin compounded the felony. ‘Ginger were doin’ summat. I’ve smelt sweeter pongs round t’ back end o’ t’ muck cart on a Friday.’

  Ginger, wearing an expression of mild hurt on his battle-scarred face, came to stand next to me. Fortunately, he seemed to have suspended his musical interlude for the moment. ‘We’ll wait fer Tommo,’ he announced. ‘Tommo’ll know what’s best fer t’ do. ’E’s bin an altar boy three month.’

  The church door opened, and members of the congregation hurried past, gave us an unnecessarily wide berth, I thought. Then after a few more minutes, a smaller back door shot open and four boys were propelled, by an unseen hand, onto the pavement. While they sorted out their tangled limbs, a disembodied voice found them. ‘If I catch you lot smoking again, I’ll cane your backsides.’ It was the priest, I suddenly realized. His bobbing and scraping altar boys were being threatened with actual bodily harm. Mind, they looked a rough lot without their white blouses. Three of them clattered off in iron-soled clogs, while the fourth, a boy with impressive pinkish hair, sauntered towards us.

  The priest poked his head into the street. ‘Bernard Thompson?’

  ‘Yes?’ The pink head did not turn towards the priest, as its owner was coming towards me.

  ‘Have you stuck this chewing gum on the Immaculate Conception?’

  ‘No, Father.’

  ‘Then who did?’

  The boy’s shoulders shrugged and he made no reply.

  Within ten seconds, the man of God was upon us. ‘Did you hear me, boy?’

  ‘Yes.’ After a short pause, ‘Father,’ was appended to the curt answer.

  ‘Look.’ The priest was white with anger, looked strange in his proper clothes, black trousers, a black top with no sleeves and hardly any back, just strings fastening the cloth to his chest. The back-to-front collar wasn’t anchored down, so it hung like a hoop that had been thrown at a prize on a fair stall. ‘There’s boot polish all over the chair in the vestry. You are a wicked boy, Bernard. What would your father say if I told him? And there’s two more bottles of unconsecrated communion wine missing from the cupboard.’

  At last, Tommo rewarded the priest with his full attention, the main part of which was a winning smile that displayed perfect teeth. ‘Father, there’s mischief afoot. The choir was out of tune during Benediction last Sunday. Perhaps some of them had been drinking?’ He talked nicely, wore decent clothes.

  The priest was still fuming. ‘Listen, Thompson. It took my cleaning ladies two hours to get the candle wax off the Sacred Heart the other day. Since you started serving, St Patrick’s has gone to the dogs.’

  Tommo shook his head slowly, sadly. ‘In that case, Father, I shall remove myself from your church and I shall not darken your door again.’

  A twin nudged me. ‘’E reads books,’ she whispered. ‘Proper books with ’ard backs, not like wot you buy at t’ paper shop. ’E can do right big words, Tommo.’

  The reverend father clouted Tommo round the ear. ‘You are a menace, boy. I have always believed, or have tried to believe, that a human being is not born bad. In your case, however, I have to admit that you may be the exception which proves the rule. In time, you will no doubt go to prison.’ He cast an eye over the rest of us. ‘As for you, stay away from this boy. Unless you want to spend your days in trouble, of course.’ He marched off, stopped when his collar dropped off, bent to retrieve it.

  Tommo rubbed his ear. ‘I should sue him,’ he grumbled. ‘He always goes for an ear. I could finish up deaf or brain damaged.’ He moved his eyes over me. ‘New girl?’

  ‘Yes.’ I felt shy, embarrassed.

  Ginger pushed himself forward. ‘This ’ere girl got stole when she were a babby.’ A filthy thumb jerked itself in my direction. ‘’Er’s bin brung up wi’ folk wot keeps ’er locked up. In t’ will, ’er grandad said about ’er ’avin’ fer t’ go an’ be an ’Oly Mary. So we’re lookin’ fer ’er mam.’

  Tommo walked round me, bored into my spine with his gaze. ‘That, in my opinion, is a load of my eye and Betty Martin. This young lady is having you on.’

  ‘Don’t ’e talk luvely?’ asked a twin. No-one bothered to reply.

  Ginger confronted me. ‘Is ’e reet? Is Tommo reet? ’Ave yer bin pullin’ our legs?’

  Something about Tommo made me straighten my skirt and push the hair from my face. ‘Of course,’ I answered sweetly. ‘It was a joke.’

  Several emotions did a procession across Ginger’s face, then he grinned hugely. ‘That were a good un,’ he yelled. ‘D’ yer want fer t’ be one o’ t’ gang? There’s me an’ Art,’ he pointed to the buck-toothed boy, ‘an’ t’ twins an’ Tommo. We’ve a few more, but they jus’ cum part time, like. Are you in wi’ us?’

  In? I would have donated an arm and a leg just to hover on the edge of it all! ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘What’s yer name?’ asked a twin.

  ‘Laura.’

  ‘We’ll call ’er Lo,’ pronounced Ginger.

  ‘I shall call her Laura,’ said Tommo. ‘It suits her.’ He raked his eyes over the church. ‘He can’t be allowed to get away with that. The bloody priests have no right to hit us and knock us about.’

  Art grabbed Tommo’s sleeve. ‘What yer goin’ fer t’ do, Tommo? Thmash a winder?’

  Tommo grinned, but his face was cold. ‘No. I shall just leave my mark.’ From his pocket, he took a crumb of chalk. Then he strode to the large double doors of the church and wrote, THE PRIEST HERE IS A BIG F. A hand shot out of the porch and dragged Tommo inside. There followed several moments of silent tension, the twins clinging together in mortal fear, Ginger chewing his lip, Art doing his best to hide behind a street lamp.

  Tommo emerged, his face red, the lower lip bleeding. With amazing coolness, he finished off his written message, then joined us on the corner.

  ‘Yer mouth’s bleedin’,’ cried a twin.

  Tommo leered at her. ‘He’s in a worse state than I am, Enid. He’ll be afraid to put his face out of the presbytery for weeks.’

  ‘Why?’ Ginger’s eyes were saucers. ‘Whar ’ave yer dun?’

  Tommo whistled under his breath. ‘Remember that vicar up Chorley way – it was in the paper last year? He liked little boys, didn’t he? Liked them a bit too much?’

  Everyone looked as puzzled as I felt, but Tommo continued unabashed. ‘Father Sullivan will have to watch his step. I told him I’d go to the police and accuse him of interfering.’

  ‘Oh.’ Art seemed
satisfied with this, nodded a few times, kept saying ‘Oh.’ ‘They alwayth interfere, grown-upth. ’Appen he’ll thtop interferin’ now, Tommo.’

  The worldly wise boy hooted and shook his pink curls. ‘Where shall we go now?’ he asked.

  Ginger grabbed my arm and dragged me off, beckoned to the rest of the group. ‘Cum on, we’ve a bob an’ fivepence.’

  It was the first happy day of my life. No matter what happened from now on, I would have the gang. No-one would take my special new friends away from me. And the most special of them all was the boy called Tommo. He had hair of a gentler shade than Ginger’s, a colour that I would learn to call strawberry blond. His real name was Bernard Thompson. Bernard Thompson was to have an effect on me that would last for ever. But on that day, he was Tommo, just another ally.

  Chapter Seven

  Tommy-gun left our school soon after my first encounter with Tommo and the gang. It was strange that I should lose one person and gain another with a similar name. Sister Maria Goretti could see that I was pretending not to be upset after the farewell assembly. She cornered me under St Francis of Assisi, who seemed a nice chap, because he actually smiled and was surrounded by animals. ‘Laura, she’s getting on in years and she needs to retire.’

  ‘I know.’

  The young nun took my hand when all the other girls had disappeared. ‘Look, she’s away back to Ireland in a day or so. She’s very fond of you. Would you like to come into the convent and say a private goodbye?’

  The emotion of it all would have been too much for me. Since meeting the gang, I was tense, excitable. Saying goodbye to Tommy-gun could well turn out to be the last straw, and I didn’t want to show myself up by weeping and gnashing my teeth. ‘No, Sister. I’ve got to finish my story.’

  ‘Ah.’ The other hand went up to touch the pin on top of her head. For a nun, Confetti was a rather harum-scarum type, with a veil that was often off-centre and a black skirt that always looked as if it needed ironing. ‘You’ll win.’

  I shrugged. ‘I won the school prize, but there’s only two classes in our year. In the whole of Bolton, there’ll be hundreds of kids entering.’

  ‘But you’re talented.’

  No-one at home had ever said that I was talented or clever. Auntie Maisie had always loved me, Uncle Freddie had often said that I was a nice good girl, but even Anne treated me as a very ordinary soul. If I turned out extraordinary, then I would be the most surprised of all. ‘I just like stories,’ I said.

  Confetti put her head on one side and the top pin tumbled to the floor. I retrieved it, tried not to flinch as she skewered the headgear to her skull. ‘Does your mammy read your stories when you carry them home from school?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And your father?’

  I shrugged. ‘He’s busy inventing things.’

  ‘So they don’t know that a budding author resides in their midst?’

  ‘No.’ I tended to ignore Confetti’s enthusiasms. She reckoned that Norma Wallace was the next Madame Curie, that Lizzie Boardman would be the greatest nurse since Nightingale, and that I might well finish up in libraries like Shakespeare and some fellow called Dickens for whom she carried the brightest of her many torches. ‘I’m just Laura to them,’ I said. ‘Not a budding author or anything much. Well, Dad calls me Laurie-child, and that annoys my mother.’

  She nodded, looked pensive for a moment or two. ‘Are you … are you unhappy at home?’

  ‘No.’

  She coughed. ‘Happy, then?’

  ‘No. I’m just all right.’

  ‘Do you get punished often?’

  The third degree did not please me. ‘Sometimes I get smacked. Not as often as I used to.’ My first outing with the gang had been expensive. It had cost me 1s 8d and a battering from Mother, but it had been worth every penny, every blow. And I wasn’t getting too many hidings lately, because Mother was out a lot, doing good deeds with Mr Openshaw from the chapel, taking food parcels to the poor and helping out with big families. This new behaviour of Mother’s had opened my eyes slightly, had made me look at her differently. Perhaps she had found her good side, perhaps she liked some people and I wasn’t one of the people she liked. ‘I go out more now, Sister. I’ve got friends.’

  ‘Ah. And which school do your friends attend?’

  Again, I lifted a shoulder. ‘Different ones. Some go to Peter and Paul’s, some go to Derby Street.’ I didn’t tell Sister Maria Goretti that I’d met these friends while I was trying to find sufficient courage to run away from home.

  ‘What do you do with these friends?’

  Sometimes, people were very nosy. ‘We write stories. We sit in Enid and Irene’s parlour and do poems and things.’ Enid and Irene probably had no parlour. ‘And we go to church at St Patrick’s.’ Well, we’d been once.

  She wore an expression of disbelief in her eyes. ‘I suppose I’ll get silly answers if I ask silly questions?’

  ‘Yes.’ At last, we understood one another.

  ‘Laura. Be careful. You’ve brains and a tremendous energy that could be easily misdirected.’

  I wondered if she’d heard anything. There’d been several scrapes, and one head-on encounter with police after some apples got pinched from the market. ‘I’ll be careful,’ I said. And I would indeed take care, especially when speaking to an adult. Yet I didn’t want to alienate her, needed her on my side. And I hated the idea of being without old Tommy-gun. She had what Auntie Maisie would call ‘a face like a clog back’, but I’d seen the other side of Sister St Thomas. She had been good to me, and now she was going away. It seemed that I kept on losing people who liked me. Auntie Maisie and Uncle Freddie lived just feet away from me, yet I had lost them. Would Confetti go next? Or Tommo? My heart missed a beat when I thought about life without Bernard Thompson.

  ‘Go back now to class and finish your story. We have to send it in today for the judges. Good luck, Laura.’

  I walked away from my friend and wrote one of my better stories. It was about Mr Evans, who had called himself ‘Good Evans’ and who had looked after cats and helped to win a war. And it was about the sovereign he bequeathed to me, even though I’d stolen flowers from his garden. Love, I suppose, was the theme of my scribbling. Those who read it must have recognized a lonely child who sought affection, but I simply scribbled down what came into my heart as a tribute to a wonderful old man.

  My name was placed on the short-list together with many others from schools throughout the town. There was to be a function at the Victoria Hall, some singing by choirs from various schools, a few tunes from discordant youth orchestras. We received an invitation with a crinkly edge and curly writing. It popped through the letterbox a day or so before the event, and Dad stood it on the mantelpiece next to the clock. ‘We’ll be proud of you, Laurie-child, whether you win or not.’

  On the evening of the presentations, I went back to school and climbed into a cramped charabanc with the choir, the orchestra, three nuns and a thin woman called Miss Bridges. Miss Bridges taught music, so she was a vague and wispy person with vague and wispy hair. Norma Wallace always said that Ida Bridges was a genius and that geniuses did not make good teachers. There was a lot of messing about during music lessons, whispering and giggling and throwing of bits of blotting paper dipped in watery ink. Geniuses appear not to notice much.

  I slipped into a vacant seat next to some very small violins and a box of recorders. So the evening promised to be hilarious then. The St Mary’s orchestra was like cats on the tiles, just a lot of wailing and screeching. Confetti leaned over me. ‘Are you all right there, Laura?’

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  She lowered her tone. ‘They’re going to play in public. And the choir’s going to sing.’

  ‘Oh.’ I didn’t know what to say.

  She pulled a wad of cotton wool from her pocket. ‘May God preserve us,’ she muttered. ‘Do you want some of this?’

  ‘No, Sister. I’m used to the noise.’


  Miss Bridges was standing in the centre aisle, her hair messier than ever. ‘Where is she? We shall have no first violin if Mary doesn’t come. Audrey? Look outside and see if she’s there. Who has the sheet music? Has anyone seen my baton? Please give it to me, Susan. No, it is not a fencing sword, this is my conductor’s baton. There’s a music case somewhere, and my handbag. Ah no, I remember that I didn’t bring my handbag. Mary – come along, stop dawdling. No, your mummy must take the tram or the bus to town, as we have no room on the coach. Who threw that?’ Toffee papers were flying round the bus like a plague of cabbage white butterflies. ‘Really, girls, I do wish you would settle down and behave like young ladies.’

  They quickly became young ladies when Sister Agatha appeared, her voluminous skirts spread as wide as any crinoline. She climbed into the vehicle, stared straight ahead, simply waited for silence. Sister Agatha would have been very useful during the war, because even the Germans would have fled from an expression as sour as hers.

  We trundled off to town, unloaded ourselves outside the Market Hall and marched across the road in an untidy crocodile. Sister Maria Goretti stood in the middle of the traffic waving her arms as if bringing in an aeroplane. Some loving parents accosted their daughters, straightened ties and collars, pulled up wrinkled stockings, brandished combs and brushes. No-one waited for me. Dad would no doubt be inside. I wondered whether Mother would turn up, but she’d probably gone out again to save some family from starvation and fleas.

  The music was unbelievably bad. Even the Mayor of Bolton squirmed in his seat, while I wished with all my heart that I’d taken the cotton wool from Confetti. The best performers were from Peter and Paul’s, a group of little girls in their best white communion frocks. They sang about a gypsy woman called Meg and made a good job of it. Everyone else’s renditions were murderous, though nothing was quite as wonderfully appalling as the St Mary’s Strings. The St Mary’s Strings were accompanied by Miss Bridges on the piano. She played all the right notes, probably in the right order, but my colleagues were, as ever, a law unto themselves. When those tortured miniature violins were finally put out of their misery, a collective sigh of relief hovered in the air above the audience. But I looked at Sister Agatha in that moment and saw something on her face. It wasn’t pride, but it was certainly love. Seeing that made me special again, because I was close to these holy women. They knew me and some of them allowed me to know them. They were full of charity, those brides of Christ, but they made sure that few of us discovered their inner gentleness.