woe betide him if he didn’t do her bidding. The thought of being on the receiving end of her wrath again and possibly suffering a battering was torture to Arch. He couldn’t bear the thought of anyone knowing how he’d received his injuries. Not even Aidy.
Pat was incensed by the news her son had just hesitantly delivered. Pat herself had been born the ninth child of fourteen, to a family so poor she’d never had a pair of shoes until she was seven and only then cast-offs given to her by the kindly woman her mother cleaned for … before it was discovered that her mam had been thieving and was sacked from her job.
For Pat, though, the utter joy of experiencing her chilblain-riddled feet warmly encased in leather, something she’d only dreamed of before, was to be short lived. Cuddling the shoes protectively to her when she went to sleep that night on the bug-infested flock mattress she shared with four of her sisters, in a room so damp fungi grew on the walls, she awoke the next morning to find them gone. It transpired that her mother had pawned them to pay for the bread and margarine they all ate that morning for breakfast, food that Pat had to fight her siblings for in order to get her share. The loss of those precious shoes was devastating to her. It was to fuel within her an unbridled determination that, when she grew up, never would she be in such dire straits she had to pawn a pair of children’s shoes in order to feed her family.
Unfortunately for Pat, though, she didn’t possess the basic intelligence to realise that working her way out of poverty was the way of securing a better way of life, not marrying the first man who showed an interest in her who had a regular job, and getting herself pregnant to make sure she landed him. Jim Nelson’s wage for his labouring job might have seemed a fortune to her while they were courting as, unbeknown to her, he only handed over to his weak-minded, widowed mother the smallest amount he could get away with, squandering the rest on his own enjoyment. In Pat’s eyes, anyone who could afford the price of a few drinks three nights a week was rich indeed, but when it came to funding the rent and paying for life’s necessities, Jim’s wage went nowhere near far enough.
To her utter dismay, marriage had brought no improvement in Pat’s life whatsoever. She was quick to realise there was not much hope of any change in it either. Jim Nelson rapidly proved he hadn’t got it in him to provide for her any more than he was already doing, no matter how much she screamed and bullied him. Visits to the pawn with anything she could lay her hands on were as much a part of Pat’s life as they always had been, as was begging for handouts from benevolent people. Now, at the age of forty-three, her determination to secure a better life for herself than her parents had had was starting to fade.
But it was to be resurrected by the death of her youngest son’s mother-in-law.
This was her chance to leapfrog out of their paltry, two-bedroomed slum dwelling in the poorest street in the district, straight into Jessie’s well-maintained three-bedroomed family home. That would be a triumph indeed for Pat, and she was determined to achieve her aim, no matter what.
When making her offer, she had bargained on the fact that her daughter-in-law would be so bowed down by grief and faltering at the thought of taking on her siblings and grandmother, she would eagerly accept. Pat had not considered that her offer would be turned down by Aidy. How she detested that girl! Her two other sons had married the type of women who, on first introduction to Pat, had immediately allowed her to intimidate them. Consequently both had since danced to her tune, for fear of upsetting her and the consequences. But Aidy was not the sort to allow another woman to dominate her life. From the very start, she had proved a match for Pat. Their whole relationship was one long battle of wills and, much to Pat’s fury, it was Aidy who always managed to win out in the end.
But this move to Jessie’s might be Pat’s only chance of ever improving her lot, and she wasn’t about to give it up without one hell of