by Annie Murray
Tavleen’s husband sent the twins back to India to be cared for and disappeared from the community. Soon it was rumoured that he had been seen in Yorkshire.
Tavleen’s death changed things for Meena. Until then her own marriage had been functional, nothing more. She expected nothing much from it other than to bear children, to cook and clean and be her husband’s servant.
Meena started to look more closely at Khushwant. What she saw was a man who began to touch her emotions. Khushwant was not a leader or a thinker. He liked to keep his head down and be told what to do. He had begun their marriage by beating her because he believed that was what was expected. But he had learned and changed.
That year, as her belly bulged outwards with the growth of Sukhdeep inside her, among the men Khushwant worked and drank with there was a growing discontent. Pubs like the Waggon and Horses operated an unofficial colour bar.
‘They are saying,’ Khushwant explained to her, ‘that the pub gaffa tells us we can drink in this room, but not in that. That room is for whites only. Whites can drink anywhere, but we have to keep to one or two rooms only. Some people are getting angry about it. A lot of pubs are doing the same thing.’
There was also anger that the black immigrants always got the lowest-paid, hardest work, with no chance to develop to something more skilled.
‘Always a “mate” to the white worker, you see,’ Khushwant explained. ‘They get all the skilled jobs, when we could learn to do the job – easy – and get better pay.’
Meena could see how unfair this was, but when there was talk of forming a union to get things changed, Khushwant slid away from it.
‘I don’t want to get involved in all that,’ he would say wearily. ‘I’ve got enough on my plate. Let others do it, if they want.’
She realized he was afraid. He was not one to stick his head above any parapet, or be political. He did not like change or disturbance. Seeing this, she realized it had taken him a particular kind of courage to leave his homeland, to make this great transition to England and build a future for their family. She admired him afresh for it.
Four months after Sukhdeep was born, in June 1964, there had been a General Election, which affected Smethwick in a particularly ugly way. The Labour candidate, who had held the seat for the previous four General Elections, was expected to win comfortably. However, he was ousted. Smethwick, which had chosen Oswald Mosley as its MP in the late 1920s, voted in a Tory called Peter Griffiths on the slogan, ‘IF YOU WANT A NIGGER FOR A NEIGHBOUR, VOTE LABOUR.’
Meena was, as usual, protected from the raw impact of all this by her lack of English. She still rarely spoke to anyone who was not a Punjabi like herself. But everyone was talking about it. Cradling Sukhdeep in her arms, she felt a deep sense of belonging with her new daughter, with her people and with her husband who had to confront such problems and hostility every day.
It was all because of his hard work, she saw, that they were about to move into their own terraced house in Smethwick. For the first time they would have hot water: an Ascot heater in the kitchen. Later there were more moves. To the first house in Handsworth, a bigger terrace with a bathroom. This was after Khushwant and his friend Sachman had got together to set up the leather-goods factory. In the end, Khushwant had bought Sachman out. He had enabled growth upon growth in their fortunes by his dogged hard work.
After Sukhdeep was born it felt as if they were more united. Khushwant truly seemed to feel he had a family now, and he doted on his little girl. Raj observed this and sometimes played up. Pavan and Harpreet followed. In 1978 they moved to Handsworth Wood.
One evening when they were still living in the first, smaller Handsworth house and Harpreet was roughly twelve months old, Meena had gone through all the day’s usual routines. She had fed the older children, who now clamoured for fish fingers and baked beans instead of rice or dal. (‘Why don’t you learn English?’ Sukhdeep asked her sometimes. ‘There are classes you can go to.’ Meena never felt the need. It seemed too late, after all these years.)
That evening Khushwant was, as ever, working late at the factory. She had cooked him Indian food: dal and rice and potato and cauliflower curry. The children were all in bed.
At about nine o’clock she heard Khushwant’s key in the lock and stood up to greet him. Going through to the front room, she saw him for a moment with his back to her, his hand still on the Yale lock, fastening the door. His clothes had the sagging look of cheap garments that had been much sat in. He was not so fat in those days: the business sapped his energy. It was a heavy, anxious struggle for an already anxious man. Every line of him – the droop of his shoulders, his lank hair and slow manner – spoke of exhaustion.
In that moment Meena knew for the first time that she loved her husband. The feeling swelled and glowed inside her.
He turned, his smile growing uncertainly to meet hers.
‘Come,’ was all she said. ‘I have food ready.’
This growth of love was a certainty she had clung to through the years. It was right: God-given. It made sense of everything about the system in which she lived. The English criticize us for arranged marriages, she thought. But this is how it is. We marry a stranger, we create a family, struggle together through thick and thin. We make a life and, with God’s help, we grow into love for each other. She saw this in Banita also. She could dismiss Tavleen’s husband: Tavleen had been married off to a man who was evil and godless from the start. In her mind she placed him in a different category. Though it was Tavleen’s death that had bequeathed her the gift of looking at her husband and starting to see the good she had.
Now she clung to the certainty that her religion, her culture was right. If two good people came together with their families’ help and God’s blessing, they would learn their way into a marriage. The belief made her feel steady and safe. It helped to heal things about her past, the rupture that had happened in her parents’ lives. This was the wisdom of God, unchanging and benign, and it was wise to surrender to it. It was the way to be a woman: it made sense of everything in life.
Or it did until the end of Sukhdeep’s marriage.
Twenty-Four
Birmingham, 8th May 1945
Margaret sat on the edge of her bed in the darkening room, the blue envelope in her lap.
She could hear the buzz of celebration from outside. There were tables all along Upper Ridley Street, with adults and children alike crammed along them. Strings of bunting rippled over their heads and the children waved paper Union Jacks and wore party hats. Everyone had pooled meagre rations and done their best to make it into party food, laying out plates of sandwiches, dry cake and jelly, and here and there a precious bottle that had been saved up for a celebration.
UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER BY GERMANY!
So far as Europe was concerned, the war was over! It was Victory in Europe Day and a public holiday.
Mrs Jennings from next door had done her best to involve Margaret in everything, although she was rushed off her feet herself and was scatty at the best of times. Out of loyalty to Alice Winters, and fondness for the little Margaret she remembered from before the war, she looked out for her, trying to bring some care into the misery of her life. Dora Jennings’ four children were older than Margaret, but she was kind enough to let Margaret tag along.
The morning had been full of busyness. The men who were at home gathered anything they could find in the way of tables; the women were preparing food. There was an atmosphere of wild excitement, and those who were full of grief instead of celebration tended to keep to themselves. One woman in the back court where they lived had lost her son at Monte Cassino. Another’s husband was a prisoner of war. Even Ron, Mrs Jennings’ husband, who was usually a chirpy soul, was attacked by a fit of gloom.
‘It’s all very well,’ he said through a cigarette stub, rifling around in the scullery, ‘but will there be any jobs now it’s all over?’ (Rattle, clatter.) ‘It’s all right when there’s a war on, but the dole queues’ll
be back again.’ (Bang!)
‘What are you looking for, Ron?’ Mrs Jennings called out. She, Margaret and Sally Jennings, who was sixteen, were spreading bread with fishpaste and jam. Dora Jennings had her dark hair up in a scarf. Her handsome face turned, exasperated, towards the scullery.
‘I’m trying to find the hammer,’ Ron said. ‘There’s a nail sticking right out of that table – could do someone a nasty injury. I know we had a hammer . . .’
‘It’s in the bedroom,’ Dora said, going back to spreading the bread.
‘What the hell’s it doing up there?’
‘I don’t know, Ron.’ (Spread, spread.) ‘You most probably must of left it there . . .’
Margaret’s spirits lifted a little as she carried food out to the tables and felt the party atmosphere. Odd bits of song kept bursting through, and the colourful bunting made it look really cheerful.
It was a beautiful, warm day and everyone sat out, eating and enjoying themselves, still hardly able to believe it was all really over.
‘Your pa not around, then?’ Sally Jennings asked Margaret, in between eating Madeira cake and joining in the cheering. The air was full of the smells of food and cigarette smoke.
‘No.’ Margaret shrugged. What difference would it have made if he was? Ted Winters showed no fatherly feeling towards her. She might as well not exist, except as a skivvy.
Later on in the afternoon, as the other kids played around the tables and there was well-oiled singing, she could not bear it any longer and slipped away. She knew no one would miss her. They’d just think she’d gone to the lav.
Slipping inside the house, she went up to her room. She sat staring at nothing for some time. Then, as she so often did, she reached under her pillow for the letter.
Orchard House,
Buckley,
Worcestershire
15th December 1944
Dear Maggie,
We do hope this letter reaches you all right. Lucy and I have not written to you sooner, partly because it took us quite some time and difficulty to obtain your full address, and also because we thought it wise to let you have some months to settle back into your home life. We hope very much that you have now done so and are feeling well adjusted and happy in your family home.
Your leaving of us was so sudden that I must confess I found it most upsetting and it has taken us quite some time to get over it. Dotty was lost without you, and I’m quite sure Rags and ‘the girls’ in the paddock missed your visits as well. All of them are well. Since your departure, and quite recently, Dotty, though far from being youthful herself, has mysteriously managed to find herself a suitor and is, as I write, expecting pups! That will mean a certain amount of disruption in the house, I’m sure, but we are now of course rather excited at the prospect.
Lucy and I are most interested to know how you are getting on, and we both hope very much that you will write us a few lines to tell us your news. We hope you are still progressing well in your lessons. You are a clever little girl, dear, and could go far. John and Patty are getting along well at school now they are back in Birmingham – I’m sure they would also be delighted to see you, Maggie dear, as would we, if a visit could ever be arranged. Their address is as follows. [There was an address in Sparkhill, and then the letter signed off with another entreaty for Margaret to write with her news.]
Yours affectionately,
Jenny Clairmont
Margaret had read the letter hundreds of times, and knew every sentence in it off by heart. She sat holding it, comforted by the good quality of the paper, which contrasted with the cheap, lined sheets she had to write on – when she could find any at all. Paper was in very short supply.
Still holding the letter, she stared down at her feet, which were clad in a pair of old black lace-ups, which Mrs Jennings had got for her from the rag market. They were a size too big, ‘But you’ll grow into them, bab,’ Mrs Jennings had said. She had then had the task of extracting the money for them from Ted Winters, who claimed to have no idea that children grew and had to be clothed and shod.
‘Why should I pay to dress your daughter?’ Dora demanded of him. ‘You do bugger-all else for her – the least you can do is keep her in shoe leather.’
Margaret thought of the nice pair of brown T-bar shoes that the sisters had bought for her when she was in Buckley, which had fitted her feet like soft gloves. They had been in the holdall that Ted Winters hurled over the gate that March morning. The morning he had thrown her life away.
This was supposedly her real life, but she felt like an outsider. The life she yearned for from the depths of her heart, and the place where she belonged – all this was in Buckley, where she was a real person. A girl called Maggie.
That freezing night when she and her father, Ted Winters, finally reached Birmingham and trudged the last mile from the railway station, the smells of the city rushed in to meet her. She had forgotten it. In more than four years she had become a country girl, breathing air flavoured with leaf mulch and wood smoke in winter, blossom and wheat in the warmer months. Stumbling along these murky, blacked-out streets, all the smells were of a manufacturing smokiness that was bitter and acrid.
On the main roads, by the dim lights of blacked-out buses, she caught glimpses of the bulky outline of her father. He had walked all day in silence, except to curse her and tell her to ‘Get on!’ Already she loathed him. At last, after a day that had seemed several eternities, they turned down the slimy entry in Upper Ridley Street, groping along in the darkness.
The house was as cold as a tomb. When Ted Winters struck a match and lit the gas mantle, Margaret giddily seized the back of a chair. She was already weak from hunger and exhaustion, but the sight of the room stunned her. She knew it so well, knew it the way a dream comes back to you in the morning. Was this real? Is this where she had come from? And of course she knew, with dread certainty, that it was. That last morning came rushing back into her mind: her mother coming round the door; the smell of the newly baked loaf . . .
‘Mom?’ she murmured. ‘Where’s my mom?’
Ted Winters was riddling the range, hoping to stir some last life into it. He barely turned his head.
‘I told yer – your mother passed on, years back. You won’t be seeing ’er again. You’re the one who’s gunna keep the ’ouse now.’
He did at least brew a cup of tea and gave Margaret some in a jam jar. There was just one cup in the house. She sank onto the rickety chair and found her feet could touch the ground. Last time she had sat on it, Tommy had lifted her up there.
‘Tommy?’ she said. Her forgotten family seemed to rush back to her. ‘Is Tommy coming back too?’
Ted Winters was crouched over the table, holding his cup up close to his stubbly chin.
‘Yer brother? Nah. Gone for good, ’e has. Yer won’t be seeing that one again. Good riddance. And you’re only ’ere ’cause yer’ve got a job to do. I’m not looking for another mouth to feed.’ He cocked his head towards the stairs. ‘Go on now – get up to bed. You can sleep in the attic.’
Sitting on the bed, as the victory celebrations went on outside, Margaret pressed the letter against her body, as she had done so many times, trying to find comfort in it. She knew she would not reply. She would never see the sisters again or go back to that life. It had been like a miraculous land at the parting of the sea, over which the waters had closed again, leaving her with a knowledge and a hunger that she would not otherwise have had. She was Margaret Winters, the boss-eyed daughter of a man called Ted Winters, a girl who skivvied and slaved without a word of thanks, who barely had a rag to call her own and whose father didn’t care if she lived or died, so long as she did his bidding. But that letter reminded her that, inside Margaret, there was a girl who knew how to speak differently, who had read and played in the fresh air, done sewing that wasn’t just darning the old man’s socks, ridden a pony and played with Dotty the dog. Inside was a girl called Maggie who knew how good life could be.
But now, that Maggie was dead and buried.
Twenty-Five
The morning after Ted Winters brought Margaret back to Birmingham, she woke up to hear him bawling up the stairs.
‘Wench! Get yerself down ’ere! You’re no sodding good to me lying around in bed.’
Margaret leapt up from sleep and sat hugging her knees, shivering with cold and gazing, bewildered, round the attic room. The floor was bare, rough boards, and the only furniture was a narrow cupboard and the iron bedstead on which she had slept. She had covered herself with one thin, yellowish blanket, which had an odd, brown stain up the middle. The dark cupboard had one of its hinges missing, so that its door hung drunkenly to one side. Margaret could see daylight through cracks around the window frame.
‘Where are yer?’ His voice hectored. ‘Get yerself down ’ere!’
Margaret badly needed to relieve herself and there was no sign of a chamber pot. She dimly remembered that the lavatories were up at the other end of the yard. She was still dressed in her clothes from yesterday, so she pushed her feet into her shoes and crept down the stairs. The Old Man was standing with his back to her in a singlet, shaving at the scullery sink, over which hung a small, rectangular mirror.
‘’Bout time. I dain’t bring you all the way back ’ere just to lie a-bed. You can get the fire going – and get some tea on,’ he ordered.
‘I need the lavatory,’ she said. That’s what they called it in Buckley.
‘Ew!’ He mocked. ‘Lavatory! Well, cowing well hurry up! It’s the lav round ’ere – and you need the key. Don’t you know anything?’
Hugging herself to try and keep warm, she stepped out into a yard paved with blue bricks, some of which had heaved up with all the damp, making it necessary to watch where you walked. In the middle of the yard was a lamp and, on the far wall, a tap. The dwellings around, which backed on to others opening onto the street, looked cramped and grimy after the beautiful house she had been used to.
