Free Shattered Dreams by Vivienne Dockerty

one day I would live in a big house like this one. It’s your dad’s dreams that have been shattered, losing all that he’s built up since his father passed away, and you children who will have a share of nothing. At least the girls will make good marriages, but you lads are going to have to make your own way.”
    “Oh I can get a job easily enough, don’t you worry about me. I was working for a scrap dealer when I lived away before and the bloke would give me my old job back if I asked him to.”
    “No, Eddie, not a rag and bone man! Surely you could use your expertise in the building trade. With your experience you could easily become a foreman.”
    “Too young I think, I’ve only just had my twentieth birthday. Anyway, Mum, you’ve enough to worry you, so let me do the worrying about my life.”
    “You’re not going to leave me again, are you Eddie? Your dad will need you and the boys to keep the home fires burning. He’s too ill to find himself a job, so we’ll need all your wages coming in.”
    Eddie sighed to himself inwardly. Irene and him would never marry the way things were going on.
    Irene couldn’t help but feel a little smug when she heard of the Dockerty’s downfall. What a come down for Gladys, Eddie’s mother, having to leave her great big house and slum it in a small semi. Though maybe some good would come out of it. At least now a lowly shop girl would be on an equal footing with them.
    Work had started on a flour mill near to the dock road where Irene lived. She told Eddie about it when he came to see her one evening to report that he hadn’t found any work. The situation in the building trade was getting worse, no new estates were being built and what little building there was had queues of men like Eddie wanting to be taken on.
    He visited the flour mill site the next morning, but the only vacancy they had was for laying drains. “Not a problem,” Eddie had told the foreman, his spirits soaring as he felt he’d got the job, but then he was asked if he was in a trade union. Eddie shook his head; his father had never employed union men because he had the fixed idea that they would disrupt the job.
    “Sorry,” said the elderly chap. “No union card, no job.”
    It posed a problem for Eddie, as he was fed up with trailing about looking for work on the Wirral and his next port of call would have to be Liverpool. His brothers had taken temporary work in a factory in Bromborough, but Eddie hated the idea of being cooped up inside.
    As he walked along the dock road dejectedly, a flash of inspiration came. He’d travel over to Neston and see if his uncle would give him a hand. Not take him on as a workman, no that would surely give his father a heart attack, but maybe the Sheldon work force belonged to a union and he could help him get a card?
    Eddie caught the train from Woodside to Neston. Luckily he had the fare, as his mother had given him a little money that morning. Selwyn Lodge, where his uncle lived, was near to St Winefred’s, the church that the Dockerty family sometimes attended. Though Eddie had never visited his uncle’s home, he certainly knew where it was.
    “Yes, Mr Haines is at home,” said the maid as she answered Eddie’s tentative knock on the front door. “Whom shall I say is calling?”
    “My name is Edward Dockerty, would you tell him it’s J.C.’s son.”
    “Certainly, Sir, just a moment.”And the maid disappeared down the hallway.
    Eddie stepped back to look in appreciation at the old house that belonged to his uncle. He knew the story of the split between his Uncle Michael and Hannah, his grandmother. Sometimes J.C. would bemoan the fact that if Michael hadn’t been so greedy, it would have been them that lived at Selwyn Lodge and they would have had all the advantages that Michael’s sons had. But maybe his uncle had more of a head for business, thought Eddie disloyally. His father was never thrifty and spent money as it came along.
    The maid came back