When the policeman knocked on Mrs Mountjoy’s door in Palomar St, curtains twitched in the neighboring houses. There hadn’t been a policeman on her doorstep since Mr Mountjoy left, some years before.
Young Ellen Mountjoy opened the door, and screeched back over her shoulder.
“Mam, the law’s ‘ere!”
Such a summons might have flustered a weaker woman, but Mrs Mountjoy came calmly to the door, drying her hands on her apron. Mrs Mountjoy was a large plain slab of a woman, with ruddy cheeks and gray hair scraped back into a bun. She regarded the policeman as she would have looked at a debt collector – he must have come to the wrong house.
“Mrs Mountjoy, I’m afraid I have some bad news,” the policeman said. For the first time, there was a flicker of concern in the woman’s stoic demeanor. “It’s your son, Albert – he’s had a bit of an accident. He’s broke his leg, and he’s been taken to hospital.”
The news quickly seeped into the neighboring houses in the odd way that gossip has, like damp mould slipping under the foundations. The general consensus was that this would be a real blow to Mrs Mountjoy, and not just because she was a fiercely protective mother.
After Mr Mountjoy skipped town with a waitress from Ealing, and the cafe’s weekly takings, the neighbors had breathed a collective sigh of relief. His drunken binges disturbed the peace, and Mrs Mountjoy was better off without him. She had remained with her children in the same seedy rented house in Palomar Street. The rent was cheap, but even so, there wasn’t much left over for food.
In those days before welfare, Mrs Mountjoy took in ironing to make ends meet. The house was always full of baskets of damp clothes and sheets and she ploughed through them every day with two old fashioned flat irons, as heavy as anvils.
While the eldest children were at school, the baby peered out at the world through the barred gate his mother set across the front door. Fresh air and security – she was a great one for both, was Mrs Mountjoy.
Her elder son had slipped on the icy street coming home from the shop. The eggs he had been sent for were broken along with his leg, but it wasn’t the cost of the eggs that would trouble his mother – it would be the hospital bills.
As soon as the policeman had gone, Mrs Mountjoy called Ellen and Jamie, her other children, and dressed them in clean clothes.
“Where are we going?” Ellen asked.
“To see your brother in the hospital,” Mrs Mountjoy said. She wiped the grubby faces with a damp flannel.
Ellen’s eyes bugged. “Will he die?”
“Of course not,” Mrs Mountjoy said, with authority. Ellen had no reason to doubt her. She knew that her mother always meant everything she said. Once when some of her best ironing clients had gone away on holidays, and money had run short, she had firmly told her anxious children that everything would be exactly the same as before. And so it had. Mrs Mountjoy had scrubbed floors instead, until her clients returned.
Curious faces peeked out from the windows as she walked up Palomar Street, with her children trooping behind. They were sturdy little mites, kept healthy with simple food and clean habits, but she couldn’t ward against accidents.
“I have to keep them in good health,” she told the ladies who brought their ironing to Number Three. “I can’t afford to have sick kids in hospital.”
No one would have guessed, from her impassive features, that her mind was now ticking over like a metronome. She would not ask for charity. She’d have to pay the bills somehow, even if they all had to live on boiled porridge. It wouldn’t be the first time.
The family found Albert drowsy and tearful, his leg in plaster. Mrs Mountjoy sat by the bed and held both his hands. Ellen and Jamie sat on the foot of the bed, and enviously watched the other children in the ward munching their way through bunches of grapes and big juicy peaches.
“I’m hungry, Mam,” Jamie whined.
“Shush,” Ellen said. “We’ll have supper when we go home.” She watched her mother stroking Albert’s forehead with one large, careworn hand. Her mother did not have hands like the other mothers – they were never manicured and painted, but Ellen knew how they felt on Albert’s aching head – roughened from work as they were, they were the gentlest hands Ellen ever knew.
As the eldest child, Ellen took it upon herself to keep Jamie under control while her mother comforted Albert. But as the boy in the next bed sank his teeth into another juicy peach, she couldn’t help a sigh. Everyone said it would cost money, having Albert in hospital, and she knew that this would mean shorter rations as her mother struggled to cope with the extra expense. Mrs Mountjoy never owed money if she could help it.
The family only left the hospital after Albert had fallen asleep, and made no sound as Mrs Mountjoy gently disengaged her hands from his.
She took Ellen and Jamie to see him every night, after she had finished the day’s ironing. All the money from the ironing went into a biscuit tin to pay the hospital bills. She fed Ellen and Jamie on pancakes made without eggs and spotted fruit bought from the market just before the stallholders started packing up.
It was an unpleasant diet, but Ellen and Jamie made no complaint. Ellen got dinner at school every day, and let Jamie have the lion’s share of the pancakes.
The nurses in the children’s ward grew used to Mrs Mountjoy and her children, and her stubborn refusal to leave until Albert had fallen asleep. Mrs Mountjoy never argued with anyone. She would always smile, as creaky as winding up a rusty bucket, and speak in a soft, polite voice, but she did exactly what she wanted to do.
Most of the time she just did what she had to do – now she tightened her belt and quietly thanked her lucky stars that at least Albert and Ellen were getting regular meals, thanks to the hospital and the school.
In fact, Albert was thriving on the much maligned hospital food. The other two would listen wide-eyed to his ravishing descriptions of sausages for breakfast, salad for lunch and chops for tea with ice cream for afters.
“I get more than I can eat,” he crowed.
Mrs Mountjoy also listened, her face suddenly thoughtful, but with no outward sign of the calculations going on within.
While Jamie was playing with a train belonging to the boy in the next bed, Ellen snuggled up to her mother, and drowsily listened as Mrs Mountjoy had a quiet word with Albert. The boy nodded, and as before, she sat with him until he went to sleep. Jamie had also gone to sleep, and she picked him up and carried him home, with Ellen trudging along behind on tired legs.
It was like following a moving tree, so tall and solid was her mother with Jamie in her arms. Ellen gazed about the darkened street, and a frightening thought took hold of her.
“Mum,” she said. “What happens to the kids when the hospital closes?”
Mrs Mountjoy stopped, and turned around. Jamie’s floppy head and arms jerked as her laughter rang out, echoing in b the silent street.
“Why, bless you,” she said. “Nothing happens to them. They sleep, just like you and Jamie.”
Reassured, Ellen once more fell into step behind her mother and they continued their weary journey home.
Albert stayed in hospital another two weeks, and the nightly visits continued as regularly as before. Mrs Mountjoy grew thinner but the bills were paid and no one asked how. As long as she was coping, there was no need to interfere. The strong are their own consolation.
Even the night nurse did not bother to check on the little family when they remained in the ward after the other visitors had gone. Ellen and Jamie were quiet, the little boy usually sleeping on his mother’s capacious lap. So she didn’t see Mrs Mountjoy open the drawer in the bedside cabinet and take out a bulging paper bag. The bag was provided by the hospital for other contingencies, but Albert daily filled it with some of the food he received – an apple here, a sausage there, a piece of cold meat, a slice of buttered bread. When the other children in the ward got wind of what he was doing, they would pass on grapes or oranges from their own stocks, and at night, when she got home, Mrs Mountjoy would divide the bounty between Ellen and Jamie. Only if the day’s haul was a large one, would she permit herself to share it.
Ellen and Jamie were quite sorry when Albert left the hospital and came home. But at least, now that their mother had paid all the bills, they could go back to a normal life again, with real food on the table.
That first night Albert came home, he brought with him three bags of delicious hospital food, and this time even his mother joined in, sitting round the kitchen table and laughing as they divided up the chicken, cake and fruit.
Ellen knew she would never forget this scene; a pool of light from the bulb hanging over the kitchen table, the laughing faces of her brothers, and the strong plain face of Mrs Mountjoy, content because the bills were paid, the children fed, and all without having to ask the neighbors for charity.
End
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