by Annie Murray
To give Sissons time to get back, they had to leave straight after tea.
‘Bye then, Sis,’ Tommy said, climbing up on the trap.
‘Bye, Tommy. Will you write us a letter? I’ll write you?’
Tommy made a gesture with his hand, which she could see meant that he wouldn’t.
‘See yer,’ he said. ‘Glad you’re all right.’ And he sprung up onto the trap and sat with his knees agape. For a moment it felt unbearable that he was leaving, but then the feeling passed.
Margaret stood waving him off, with John and Patty, who were now far more like a brother and sister to her than her once-beloved Tommy. Now Tommy seemed like a stranger.
Eighteen
On 18th March 1944 the RAF dropped more than three thousand tons of bombs on the city of Hamburg.
In the scale of world disaster, compared with the devastation of this city or that, the grief of a little girl in a rural English village registers zero – below zero – as do the feelings of all children in wartime. But that same day, 18th March 1944, felt to Margaret like the end of her life.
She was nine years old by then – two months away from her tenth birthday. For more than six months now she had been the only child living in Orchard House. John’s and Patty’s parents, who had in any case visited them regularly, came to the conclusion that they would now be safe enough back in Sparkhill. They were missing their children too much to leave them in the country any longer – and there was always the option to come back.
‘You will come and see us, when you get back to Birmingham, won’t you, Margaret?’ Patty said before they left. She had grown into a tall, graceful fourteen-year-old. John had also shot up and become rather gangly.
Margaret missed them both terribly. But she was made much of in Orchard House by the sisters, one of whom missed her own sons, while the other had never achieved her hope of having children of her own. And by now Margaret was also attending the village school. She had made other friends, learned to talk like them, be one of them. She was a village girl now, with a country accent, living in a house with educated, gentle people. She was learning at school, completely used to the routine and the teachers. Until someone mentioned it and reminded her, Margaret had almost forgotten she was an evacuee and had forgotten about Tommy, who had never come to see her again. These days she never gave Birmingham a thought.
She felt secure and loved, and she had learned to love back. There were so many creatures to love: the sisters of course, and Patty and John. But there was also her constant, tail-wagging companion Dotty, and the cows (Mildred had died and been replaced by another called Beryl, and Poppy was still going strong) and Rags. And there were the hens, whose warm eggs she was used to going and collecting before breakfast, and a favourite lamb every year on the farm . . . And there were kindly Emily, and old Sissons, who let her help him around the garden and paddock, talking to her now and then through his pipe.
This was life, so far as she was concerned. It would just go on and on.
The sisters had not told her that they had received a note from Ted Winters, her father, that was so brusque and rude they hadn’t known how to reply or what to do.
That Saturday midday they were finishing off making bread, with Margaret and the sisters and Emily the maid all round the big kitchen table, which was dusted with flour. The room was cosy and the windows steamed up. Margaret was standing on a stool. They had taught her how to knead the dough, which she was doing as hard as she could.
‘That’s it, Margaret – a nice lot of air in it,’ Jenny Clairmont said. ‘We’ll soon have it in the oven.’
The knocking came at the back door. Margaret first saw a pair of scruffy boots on the step, and some faded black trousers. Above, a jacket swinging open, a stained green jersey and a rough, dark-eyed face, shadowy with stubble.
‘May I help you?’ Mrs Higgins asked. Margaret could hear that she was afraid of this stranger with his grim expression.
‘Ar – yer can. I’ve come to fetch my wench. A right rigmarole I’ve ’ad getting ’ere an’ all.’ He nodded towards Margaret. ‘That ’er then?’
Margaret’s hands were clogged with dough. She just stood there as it dried on, encasing her fingers. Jenny Clairmont wiped her own hands and went to join her sister by the door.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. As the taller of the two, she seemed to have more power in the situation. ‘I’m afraid we have no way of knowing who you are.’
‘I’m that wench’s father,’ Ted Winters said angrily. ‘And I’ve come to tek ’er back ’ome with me. That’s all yer need to know about me.’
‘Maggie?’ Jenny turned. ‘Is this – do you know this man?’
Margaret’s knees had gone weak. She shook her head. Dimly, very dimly she did remember him, but . . . But . . . Her head started to whirl inside. Her father? What did this mean?
‘Course she does,’ he said. ‘’Er always was a slow’un. Now, you pack up and come with me. You’re needed at home – sharpish. Got to get back to Birnigum today.’
Margaret managed one word, which came out as a whimper. ‘Mom?’
‘Yer mother passed on years back. Now get yerself together. Don’t keep me waiting.’
‘I’ll take her upstairs,’ Jenny Clairmont said. ‘Wash your hands, Maggie.’
She was in a state, Margaret could see. As soon as they were out of earshot Jenny took hold of her by the shoulders.
‘Is that really your father? Are you sure?’
Margaret nodded. It was as if three thousand tons had gone off in her head. It was hard even to breathe.
She thought Jenny Clairmont was going to weep. ‘We should so like you to have stayed here . . . But you’re his daughter. I can’t—’
Margaret sucked in a gulp of air. ‘I want to stay here with you. Don’t make me go!’
There was nothing much the sisters could do. The child’s father had come; they could hardly refuse to give her back to him. They hurried to give her everything they could: a holdall with her clothes and shoes, her teddy, sandwiches and fruit. They helped her put her coat on.
‘Goodbye, dear . . .’
‘Oh, goodbye . . .’
She kissed each of their soft cheeks, wet with tears, as were hers. She had a scream bigger than herself trapped inside.
‘Let us have your address before you go, Mr Winters,’ Mrs Higgins asked, ‘so that we can write to dear Maggie . . .’
‘Two, back of sixteen, Upper Ridley Street,’ Ted Winters called dismissively over his shoulder. Without another word of gratitude or civility for the women who had cared for his daughter all these years, he hustled Margaret out of the door, not caring that she was sobbing her heart out.
‘We’ve got a long walk ahead of us, so yer can pack in yer blarting,’ he said. ‘Give us that bag and let’s get on with it.’
The sisters had to shut Dotty in the house to stop her chasing after them. They came out to the road and stood waving and wiping their eyes as Margaret and her father began the eight-mile walk to Worcester, from where they would catch a train to Birmingham.
Margaret sat in her front room as the memories washed through her. It came to her as physical pain, the same aching sickness she had felt then, as this man who called himself her father tore her step by step away from everything she knew and loved.
She could see her feet as they had been then, in some brown, second-hand boots that she had been given once she had grown out of Tommy’s, her blue wool skirt and little macintosh. Her father’s feet marched ahead of her, his heels worn almost to nothing. She watched those heels with loathing. Everything about him was foreign to her. He was carrying the holdall, but after a while he said, ‘Bugger this, I ain’t carrying this all the way . . .’ He threw it over the gate into a field.
Margaret stalled. Everything of hers was in there: her little life, her treasures. ‘I want it,’ she said.
‘Why?’ he turned, sneering. ‘Is there summat we can sell in there?’
�
�My things . . .’ She moved to go and fetch it, but he grabbed her by the arm.
‘Goo on – get moving, yer silly little bint.’
Now, all these years later, Margaret closed her eyes and let herself remember that day when her real self, her glowing little soul that had been nourished by her life in Buckley, had sputtered and died. Her face creased with the agony of it, of all that it had meant. And back then, as a nine-year-old, she had not known what was waiting for her in Birmingham, of those desolate years ahead. All she knew was this tearing away by a man whom she already hated with all a child’s hurt and passion.
Nineteen
Meena sat on a stool by the breakfast bar in the kitchen, a long cardigan over her nightclothes, cradling a mug of tea up close to her face. Its sweet, milky aroma filled her nostrils. Silently she watched her husband getting ready for work.
Khushwant was at the table with his back to her, munching toast and turning the pages of yesterday’s Evening Mail. His hair needed cutting, she saw. Once a raven-black, vigorously sprouting head of hair, it was greying now and encroaching down over the collar of his black jacket. The collar also showed up scattered specks of dandruff. He finished the last of his hot chocolate, belched softly and pushed his chair back. Closing the newspaper, he tapped it with his finger, twisting round to remark, ‘All this beating up of miners – sticks and truncheons! This country’s getting like India.’
Meena smiled faintly. Her husband was a good man, she knew that now. At forty-five years, he was prematurely stooped as if a weight was bearing down on him, and his joints were already arthritic: the fruits of years of hard work and worry, and his love of fatty foods. He was a big, lumbering man these days, with a heavy stomach on him.
‘You should become a sannyasi like the Hindus,’ she would tease him sometimes, patting his blancmange of a stomach as they lay in bed. ‘Go out begging for a handful of rice to fill your belly. Then you wouldn’t be so fat.’
Khushwant would chuckle.
‘Leave me alone, woman. I’m a prosperous businessman – what need have I to go begging? Anyway, how would it look if I was lean like a beggar? Everyone would think my business is failing.’
‘Too much butter,’ Meena would retort. Her own body stayed stubbornly wiry and thin. ‘So much fat – I could light you up, like a candle!’
Laughter and teasing. It had not always been like that. It had taken years for them to grow into each other. These modern women, she thought, they would have left long ago.
‘Is she going out today?’ His heavy features lifted towards the ceiling. Both knew he meant Roopinder. Neither of them had warmed to their daughter-in-law or found her easy.
‘To her mother’s.’
Khushwant rolled his eyes.
‘See you later.’ He picked up his lunch box, which she had prepared, stuffed with his favourite things: cheese sandwiches with lime pickle, onion pakoras, KitKats, bananas, and his flask of sweet, milky tea. She heard the front door close and the car starting up. Even now it astonished her that they had not just one car, but three. Roopinder had a little one to run the children about in, and Raj had just bought another to get to work. In the evening the tarmac at the front was crowded with them. Meena could remember when a bicycle had seemed an unaffordable luxury.
She was jolted out of her reminiscences by Raj. He nodded sullenly at her. His appearance immediately made her anxious and she spoke sharply.
‘You’ll be late. You need to hurry up.’
Raj poured himself a bowl of cornflakes, clicked on the radio and sat glued to it as he ate. He was sideways on to Meena and she studied him, assailed by the usual, almost unbearable tension of emotions that both her older two children now brought out in her.
The crisis in Amritsar had resulted in the army storming the Golden Temple, causing terrible damage. Among the dead, they discovered in the aftermath, was Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, the leader of the occupation, now being hailed by his followers as a hero and martyr. The Sikh uprising had been brutally crushed. Everyone was scandalized, grief-stricken, but Raj took it deeply personally. He had been full of grief and anger ever since.
Raj’s blue turban was tied immaculately. Below it he wore a neat, black sports shirt over black trousers. She knew he had practised hard to get the turban right. Wearing it, even with his new growth of beard, made his face look rounder and more boyish, though she would never have aroused the wrath of a warrior for Khalistan by saying so. The sight of it twisted her inside, pride and concern all entangled.
When he was small she had left his hair uncut, tied it up in the traditional topknot worn by young Sikh boys. When they came to England, although there were other Sikh children (some with topknots, some without), Raj had become very embarrassed by it at school. He begged her to let him stop wearing it.
‘They tease me, Mummy – they say I look like a girl.’ She could see his anguished little face now, his eyes full of tears.
Khushwant had ceased wearing a turban and went clean-shaven. He said it was much easier to get a job in England that way, to fit in and build a life in the country. Unlike some people, they had had no thought of going back to India to live. They had already been uprooted once, each of them in childhood, from what was now Pakistan. India had never felt quite like home. Khushwant’s family had come to Delhi from Jhelum in western Punjab. Both families knew what it was to leave their livestock, their crops rotting in fields that their people had farmed for generations, to go to a place where you had no land. Leaving a second time was a little easier. They had cast their lot in the UK and it had to work.
So Meena had untied Raj’s topknot and taken him for a haircut at the front-room barber’s down the street in Smethwick, feeling as if God, the Gurus and every Sikh in the district was breathing down her neck.
And, now, Raj wanted to be a Sikh, to wear the turban and bangle and other marks of his religion with pride. And she was proud of him for it, tender towards him. But she knew that for him it was not just a matter of pride – it was rage and defiance and self-assertion of a kind that Raj had had brewing inside him for years, and this made her tremble for him. To be proud to be a Sikh was one thing; but what of the way Bhindranwale had done it? Blood leading to more blood. In those faces on the TV screen, in the eyes of those young men who followed him, she saw that fanatical hatred and bloodlust that awoke images she never wanted to remember. Things you could never talk about. Eyes she had seen in Amritsar, eyes that led to screams and blood and flames. And sometimes she saw Raj’s eyes looking out that way.
The phone rang. Raj leapt up to answer it, clicking the radio off. A heated conversation followed: in Punjabi, so she could understand it. There were to be demonstrations, arrangements for Hyde Park. Raj was full of fighting talk. ‘We’ve got to show those bastards . . . Fight to the death, if necessary . . .’
Meena watched him: Raj’s whole frame was tensed with anger and self-importance. Now he had a focus for his anger. She sighed from the depths of her. Why couldn’t Raj be like his father and just keep out of it all? But all he could seem to feel for his father was contempt.
‘Won’t you be late?’ she said again, coldly, as he put the phone down.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said, dismissing her.
‘Son . . .’ Her voice was gentler now. She was fighting back tears. If she cried, he would despise her more. ‘I am afraid of what will happen.’
He didn’t even look at her. He pushed away the half-eaten cereal so hard that it nearly fell off the table. ‘We’ll handle it. It’s our business. Nothing for you to worry about.’
‘All this violence – it’s no way to—’
‘What do you know?’ he roared, turning on her. ‘They’re going round the countryside in Punjab hunting out Sikhs, killing people – our people . . . Oh, you’re just a woman. You don’t know anything . . . Look, I’ve got to go.’
He slammed out. Everything was suddenly quiet. It was still only seven-fifteen and the others were in bed.
Meen
a slipped down from the stool. She went to the table and sat spooning up the remains of Raj’s cereal. It would go to waste otherwise.
The time she had first told Raj they were going to England was on a warm September afternoon. They had been in Delhi for some time by then, having left Amritsar after the great fire took their house.
Khushwant had left for England in the summer of 1960, but Meena had remained behind with his brothers and acid-faced mother. Their humble family home in Delhi was not far from where her uncle Nirmal lived, which made Meena happy to be there, as she saw him often.
Mama-ji Nirmal was her mother’s younger brother, who had left Gujranwala with them. With his gentle, humorous ways he had long been the most important person in her life. His proximity, with his wife Bhoji and their children, made life with Meena’s mother-in-law much more bearable. Nirmal was doing well with his taxi business and he often came to see her, bringing treats, bangles and sweets or a little toy for Raj. Somewhere Nirmal had heard about Father Christmas in England and his ‘Ho, ho, ho!’, and that was often how he announced himself when he arrived.
‘Ho, ho, ho!’ they would hear at the door and Raj would run, giggling, to greet Nirmal, whose big teeth always gave him a look of smiling mischief. He would scoop Raj into his arms. A smile spread over Meena’s face as she remembered. Nirmal was always the person who had brightened her day, made her feel safe. He had been the one it had made her heart ache to leave behind.
At the back of the house was a small piece of scrubby ground shaded by a peepal tree with its big, rustling leaves, and that afternoon she was sitting beneath it on the dry ground, her little son in her lap.
