Uncle Tommy

I didn’t meet my uncle Tommy. He died in Tunisia in WW2. He lay wounded in a shell crater waiting to be rescued and a second shell landed right where he lay. The lads who were with him didn’t ever have the heart to tell my nanna the details of his demise so all she had was the dreaded “missing in action” letter and she always hoped that one day he would find his way home.

He was the eldest of a big family; seven boys and one girl, my Mam. By all accounts, Tommy was the best of sons and a good big brother to my Mam. She told stories of him always being thoughtful; if he had a little job he would always “tip up” only keeping enough to buy bran for his pet rabbits. My Mam adored him. 

The lads from the back lane would often play down by the river Tyne, scavenging for anything that might be useful or of value. They made bogeys from planks of wood and old discarded pram wheels. They played football with old tin cans. They’d be gone for the whole day. 

One day,  a lad from the gang came tearing into Nanna’s house, screaming at the top of his voice “Tommy’s in the Tyne!”

It was the great depression; shipyard men who would normally have been toiling away in the yard sat idle at home and loitered in the back lanes and on street corners.  With my Granda leading the pack, the men swarmed as one down to the river bank, arriving just in time to see Paddy O’Brien struggling out of the filthy water with Tommy. Tommy had gone down for the third time when Paddy, also a redundant shipyard man, bravely jumped into the Tyne and pulled him up.  

Tommy was unconscious and the brown rusty water spewed out of his mouth and nostrils. My Granda carried him home  to the women who kept vigil at his bedside for many days. No doctor or hospital, they couldn’t afford it. But Tommy was a strong lad and he pulled through. To die alone ten years later in a Tunisian desert.  

The Plate

I was born into a catholic family. I remember going to mass each Sunday as a child, having to keep still and quiet while the priest droned on in unintelligible Latin. All I could see was people's tall backs in front of me and I remember the overwhelming smell of damp heavy coats mixed with  incense from the ornate golden burners that were swung by the altar boys, and Brylcream plastered on men's heads giving the slicked back look of the sixties.

The highlight of the hour was when the collection time arrived; a plate passed round from person to person along the line of the pews, growing fuller and fuller with coins that magically appeared from  pockets and handbags.  Each coin dropped onto the plate with a reluctant chink. Money was tight in those days but no one would shame themselves by letting the plate pass by.

My mam told a story time and time again of the morning she had no spare money to put on the plate. She hurried to mass along the back lanes in the shadows of the shipyard cranes worrying what she would do when plate time came. It had rained the night before and there were pools of rainwater on the cobbled street. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a strange shimmering in the distance and as she approached a puddle she saw the most magnificent sight. A pile of coins lay in the puddle, just waiting to be picked up. Pennies, thruppeny bits and sixpences! She scooped up the wet coins and loaded them into her pockets, then, with a spring in her step she flew along the back lane to church. She proudly placed a sixpence on the plate, the only time she'd ever had that much to spare. She thought that the money must have appeared there as some sort of miracle, but her more rational explanation was that the money had fallen out of drunken men's pockets who had been fighting in the lane the night before. “Serves them right” she would say.