The Cobbler's Kids by Rosie Harris Page B

him to make her better.
    Irritably, Michael shook him away. ‘Get back in your bedroom and stay there,’ he ordered. ‘Now!’
    He made his way downstairs, and nudged Annie’s body with the toe of his shoe.
    ‘Don’t do that!’ Vera hissed at him, her eyes blazing.
    ‘You’d better go and fetch some help,’ he snapped.
    ‘What do we need, a doctor or an ambulance?’ she asked anxiously.
    His face was blank. ‘How the hell do I know. Get anyone.’
    Shaking with fright, Vera ran down the road to the phone box. She was so upset that she had difficulty finding the words to tell the operator what had happened and where she lived. As she reached home again she realised that she had not given their full address only said Scotland Road.
    ‘You’ll have to open up the shop door and put the lights on so that the ambulance can find the place,’ she told her father.
    She thought he was going to make a fuss, but to her relief he did as she asked without protest. He even stood out in the roadway, waiting to flag down the ambulance when it arrived.
    Benny was still huddled on the landing, his face white, his eyes streaming with tears, as he stared down between the banister rails at the inert figure of his mother still lying where she had fallen.
    Vera kept on trying to find a pulse, but there wasn’t even the slightest flicker. She was equally concerned that her mother didn’t seem to be breathing. She longed for the ambulance to arrive although, in her heart, she knew it was going to be too late.
    Annie Quinn was dead long before they took her to hospital. Vera cuddled Benny close, trying her best to comfort him, but he was inconsolable.
    Edmund was heartbroken when he arrived home and heard what had happened. Bitter and angry, he vowed revenge.
    In the days that followed, he did his best to comfort Benny, and distract him by taking him out or playing with him whenever he could. It was the worst time that he and Vera had ever experienced.
    At first Michael seemed numb with shock, morose and withdrawn. Then he pulled himself together as rumours abounded as to how Annie had fallen down the stairs. Neighbours, newspaper reporters, even the police, were all asking countless questions. It meant that they found themselves reliving the horror of what had happened over and over again.
    On the day of the funeral, Michael Quinn played the grieving husband to perfection. Dressed in his best suit and wearing a black bowler hat, he held Benny by the hand as they followed the cortege.
    Vera and Edmund walked behind him, each angry in their own fashion at the way he was exploiting little Benny who, in their opinion, should have been left with one of the neighbours.
    As well as the overpowering grief at losing their mother there was the fear at the back of both their minds about what the future might hold for them all. Their mother had been so instrumental in keeping the peace. When their father’s temper flared, and he was about to hit one of them, she had tried to placate him, even if it didn’t always work.
    Vera knew that in future her father would expect her to run the home, and she also knew that her rash, lippy attitude was bound to antagonise him. Somehow, though, she would have to try to please him, if only to make sure that he didn’t bully little Benny
    Eddy was determined that he would no longer be browbeaten by his father. He was more than halfway through his apprenticeship so, as soon as he was fully qualified, he’d be able to ask Rita to marry him and they could set up home on their own.
    He’d make sure that it was nearby, so that he could keep an eye on Vera and Benny, and make sure they weren’t being intimidated by his father. As the eldest he felt it was his duty, and that he owed it to his mother’s memory to do so. Vera hadn’t said very much about how the accident had happened, but she didn’t need to, the weal across his mother’s face told its own story.
    Some of the men he worked with at Cammell