Birmingham Friends

by Annie Murray

‘Not everyone.’

  ‘So it’s my fault. Listen – take a seat. Forgive me for not getting up.’ He spoke with the odd, ironic tone which I remembered.

  I looked round at him, using an examination of the healed wound as an excuse to take in his appearance now his face was free of dressings. He had wiry-looking blond hair, long compared with the clipped styles of the servicemen which we were growing used to. His eyes were less blue than I remembered in the soft light from the candles above his head. The scar curved round from one high cheekbone towards his fair moustache. He obviously found the candour of my gaze disconcerting and looked down. I thought he was blushing.

  ‘It’s healed well. You’re jolly lucky it missed your eye.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said sardonically. ‘Jolly.’ He turned and grinned at me suddenly, looking into my eyes so that it was I who felt compelled to look away.

  ‘Not in a dancing mood?’ I was glad to see Brenda across the room jigging about and laughing with a woman I didn’t know. This was more her cup of tea than polite chit-chat over glasses of punch.

  ‘Dancing?’ Douglas said. ‘No, most definitely not.’

  Marjorie started on ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’, her hands kneading at the keys, and most people were joining in singing the lines they knew.

  ‘Have you known Marjorie long?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know her at all. I came with Pete over there to swell the numbers, of course.’

  ‘We had the definite impression that we were padding as well.’

  ‘What you’re too polite to ask, of course,’ Douglas said, his tone oddly aggressive, ‘is why I’m not fighting with the boys in blue, khaki or any other colour? What a young male is doing here unable to make the claim that he is “on leave” from defending the nation.’

  ‘I was wondering.’

  ‘Of course you were.’

  Awkwardly he pulled himself to his feet. I realized that I had never seen him other than lying or sitting before. His right leg was skewed at the hip, the knee bending inwards so that he had to bear its weight on the ball of his foot.

  He sat down again abruptly and looked at me very directly, as if challenging me for a reaction.

  ‘Cripple, you see. Born like it. I can get around on it like the clappers as a matter of fact, but I’m not seen as being up to the old one-two, one-two, which apparently is what matters in the services. Not that I didn’t try. The army recruiting wallahs looked at me as if I was mad. Of course I only imagined they might sit me at a desk somewhere, but apparently that wasn’t on either. So it was decided that since newspapers are nourishment for the nation I should be allowed to lurch around the Mail offices doing my job – or what we’re allowed to print nowadays – as usual.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. At a time when young men felt they were proving themselves all over the country, Douglas apparently felt himself stuck like a frustrated Rumpelstiltskin, one foot trapped in the floorboards.

  ‘Oh, don’t be.’ He sank back in the chair. ‘After all, I have a war wound to show for my intrepid reportage.’

  ‘D’you always talk like that? So sarcastically?’

  ‘You’re very direct. Yes, often. It’s a defence I’ve established. If there’s something amiss with your body you have to learn to keep your end up somehow, don’t you? After all, it’s not everyone I allow to see me howling because I’ve got a lump of Christ knows what sticking out of the side of my face.’

  ‘You don’t even need to think of that. It’s my job.’

  He looked into my face with his disturbing gaze. ‘You were wonderful, I have to say. Especially coming back to see me like that.’

  I felt myself blushing. I was alarmed by the unexpected impulse I felt to put my arms round him. His eyes were extraordinary: appealing, penetrating. For a second it would have felt natural to rest my head on his shoulder. I looked away, ashamed.

  But Douglas seemed to relax suddenly, as if he trusted my acceptance of him, and I found myself talking to him, animated in a way I had not been for months. He asked about my work and how I knew Marjorie and we laughed together. Then I felt caught out, laughing like that. Confused, I turned my attention to the music, thoughts churning in my head. How would I ever know if Angus was alive somewhere? Our last night together seemed such an age away. I ached to see him, for us to hold one another, yet at the same time, if that was never going to be possible, I needed to know that too. Would we have to wait until the war was over, and even then would we know for certain? And here was I, enjoying myself at a party and wishing that this man beside me, who I barely knew, would take me in his arms.

  A group was standing round Marjorie, who had her back to us at the piano, all well into the swing of singing.

  ‘I’ll never smile again, until I smile at you,’ they belted out with incongruous jollity. The song cut through me. Should I never smile again? Had I to wait for a homecoming that might or might not happen? And how could I feel so damn sorry for myself just having to wait when for all I knew Angus might be going through the most appalling suffering? A lump grew in my throat. It all felt so hopeless, all these months of waiting and praying when I knew in my heart that Angus was dead.

  ‘Grim little number, isn’t it?’ Douglas leaned forward and spoke gently. ‘I say – you’re not crying, are you?’

  ‘No, I’m not,’ I said in a determined voice.

  ‘You are – nearly, aren’t you?’ he persisted with ungentlemanly intrusiveness. ‘Is it that – fiancé of yours?’

  Dry-eyed now, I told Douglas about our correspondence with the Red Cross.

  ‘The open grave,’ he said. ‘You poor girl.’

  ‘Don’t be nice, I really shall start, else.’

  ‘I shouldn’t mind.’ His tone was kind.

  ‘But I should. This is supposed to be a party.’

  Fortunately Marjorie decided to move on to the ENSA tune, ‘Let the People Sing’, at this point, which got some of them dancing again.

  ‘Good job it wasn’t “We’ll meet again”,’ Douglas said. ‘Or the floodgates would have opened.’

  I laughed. ‘You’re terrible.’

  ‘Am I?’ He directed an uncertain smile at me.

  ‘Actually, no. In a funny way you’ve cheered me up.’

  ‘The feeling is mutual. Most girls, once they’ve found out about my gammy leg, start treating me like some sort of damned invalid with only half a brain.’

  He sounded so bitter that without thinking I laid my hand on his arm as I would have done with a patient, then quickly withdrew it.

  We spent most of the evening talking and I found myself forgetting about everything else in a way that I only normally did when we were exceptionally busy at work. Again I found that Douglas was more ready to ask questions and learn about me than he was to disclose anything about himself. The shreds I managed to glean from him were that he had a fierce satisfaction in his job and that he was an only child whose parents lived near Gloucester.

  Towards the end of the evening, Marjorie came breezing over and said to me, ‘Ah, Katie, darling – I see you’ve been looking after poor Douglas.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Douglas said in a mock pitiful voice. ‘She’s a proper little Florence Nightingale.’

  Marjorie couldn’t work out what we were both laughing about.

  As we were leaving I moved towards the door with Douglas. I could tell he was painfully conscious that I was seeing his rocking, distorted walk for the first time. With an effort, and taking refuge in his tone of self-mockery, he said, ‘I don’t suppose you’d consider seeing me again?’

  I knew I couldn’t hold back from saying yes and giving my address for his sake. But I knew I was doing it as much for my own. As we parted, shaking hands, our eyes met and Douglas smiled, his face transformed from the sad, rather uncertain expression to one that was warm and hopeful.

  After I’d thanked Marjorie I said, ‘I’m so sorry to hear about your brother.’

  She reddened, her only hint
of emotion. ‘These things are sent to try us, I suppose.’

  Brenda joined me outside, glowing from the warmth of the room and her dancing. ‘That Susan’s a good laugh – we’re going to Ivy Benson’s tea dance next week if my duty hours fit in with it.’ She did a little twirl on the pavement. ‘That was the best evening I’ve had in ages,’ she said as we made our way carefully along the blacked-out street.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, surprising myself. ‘Me too.’

  Chapter 16

  Birmingham, 1944

  ‘Dr Williamson?’

  I can’t say I’d have been pleased to see him at the best of times, and his presence on our doorstep in the early evening foretold trouble. He walked in brusquely with barely a glance at me, saying, ‘Is your mother in?’

  I showed him into the front room. Mummy was at the back with Gladys Peck and the children. Gladys, a young mother with skin the colour of curdled milk, had come to us from South London to escape the flying bombs.

  ‘Winifred,’ Dr Williamson said, stroking his little moustache uneasily, ‘you’d better sit down.’

  Mummy wasn’t keen on Dr Williamson either. ‘I don’t wish to sit down,’ she said. ‘What’s the trouble?’

  ‘Very bad news, I’m afraid. It’s Bill. He collapsed at the surgery – his heart.’ He paused, looking down at the floor. ‘I’m afraid he died in the ambulance. I got here as soon as I could.’ My first thought was how much better Daddy would have handled this, his gift with his patients.

  My mother stood rigid. She said nothing. Her knees buckled and I helped her to a chair.

  Dr Williamson looked monstrously uncomfortable. ‘Is there anything I can do?’

  Mummy stared ahead of her as if hypnotized. Then she came to herself and without turning her head said, ‘No. Thank you.’

  Dr Williamson cleared his throat. ‘He would have been proud to die in harness,’ he offered.

  I showed him the door.

  Gladys Peck was a pleasant, anxious woman who was perpetually grateful. Although she had to care for her five-year-old, Eric, and Lizzie who was not yet two, she seemed to think that because she had been sent to live with us in a house which resembled the one in which she had first gone into service, she ought in return to act as our maid. We took a lot of trouble to stop her.

  But now Gladys came into her own.

  ‘What you need at a time like this,’ she declared, ‘is help.’ She plonked fair, curly-haired Lizzie down on the floor as if trying to root her to the ground. ‘Good job I’m here now, isn’t it?’

  And for several days, with impressive capability, she completely took over the running of our house. While Lizzie slept in our wooden cot upstairs, she scrubbed floors. She settled Eric at the table with crayons, copies of the Eagle and Beano which he was too young to be able to read properly but enjoyed the pictures, and an old toffee tin full of William’s cars and soldiers. He was a quiet, pallid child with cropped, mousy hair. Gladys donned an apron, tied back her thin hair in a pink scarf and set to, humming and singing like someone who had finally found a purpose in life. Then she’d stop, tactfully, remembering that we didn’t have much to sing about. I didn’t mind. I liked to hear her. Mostly she sang hymns: ‘The Old Rugged Cross’ and ‘Great is Thy Faithfulness’, adding her own warbles and fragments of melody.

  What was most striking was that Mummy let her do it all. She surrendered control of the house while we made arrangements, sitting in miserable silence in the sombre offices of funeral directors or in the sitting-room at home. She was like a person winded, unable to gather herself up to protest or move into action.

  ‘Gladys is wonderful, isn’t she?’ I ventured one day. Mummy was sitting with Lizzie on her lap, occupying the child with a string of coloured wooden beads. Her hair was scraped back and she looked exhausted.

  ‘She’s a great comfort,’ Mummy said, to my surprise. ‘Hearing her singing sometimes I feel . . .’ She trailed off, stroking the little girl’s curls and her soft, spongy limbs.

  ‘What?’ I asked softly. So far we had said almost nothing to each other about Daddy’s death. We had been to see him, hands across his chest, his face relaxed and strange to us. But the house felt as usual. He had been there so little when he was alive.

  ‘It’s as if she’s a kind of messenger,’ Mummy said.

  ‘From Daddy, you mean?’

  ‘No. I don’t believe that sort of thing. You know I don’t. I meant from God.’

  ‘I hope so,’ I said grimly. I got little else out of Mummy. We moved round one another, each guarding our own pain.

  I wrote and told Livy about Daddy’s death and she wrote me a sweet note in reply, but her letters were still rare. If she was having leave from the navy, she was no longer taking it at home.

  The war was turning: Paris had been liberated in August. But it all felt so sad and futile. Life was empty of the people I cared about. The one thing which warmed me at this time was that Lisa told me she was going to have Daisy baptized.

  ‘I wanted to ask you,’ she said shyly, ‘if you’d be her godmother?’

  In the middle of all this came a telephone call from Douglas. Although I’d given him my address at Marjorie’s party he had never got in touch, and he had slipped again from the forefront of my mind though I had quite often noticed his name in the Mail. In a way I was relieved. I didn’t want my feelings complicated further.

  My mother took the message. Would I meet him after work later that week, at Snow Hill Station?

  Work was a distraction at that time, being able to go out and immerse myself in it. I didn’t feel like going out socially and making an effort with someone I barely knew, but I felt that telephoning him to refuse might prove even more awkward and would hurt his feelings.

  I waited for him under the clock in Snow Hill Station as arranged, nervously tapping my umbrella against my legs. Above the cluster of people standing there, the huge hands of the clock jerked the minutes round. I was wishing like mad that I hadn’t agreed to meet him, that I could be at home, able to think quietly on my own. But as the big hand clicked over the twelve – seven o’clock – I saw Douglas come limping across the station forecourt, his camera over one shoulder, held close to his body. When he caught sight of me his smile lit his face with a warmth that lifted me.

  ‘Katie, my dear – I’m so sorry.’ He took my hand and his voice was the gentlest I’d ever heard it. I had left him a note at his office in Corporation Street, agreeing to meet him for a short time and telling him about Daddy. ‘You poor girl. You’ve had enough knocks already. I mean look at you – you’re a shadow of that bustling nurse who came along and swore at me.’

  I smiled wryly. It was true. My clothes were hanging on me. I’d had to put a tuck in the waist of my blue uniform skirt and my face was pale, shadowed under the eyes, and too gaunt for my bone structure.

  ‘Oh, well’ – I made a Douglas-like quip – ‘I always did want to be a beanpole.’ Pointing at the camera, I said, ‘D’you take that everywhere with you?’

  ‘Yes, pretty much. Just in case.’ He looked at me, concerned. ‘I’ll bet you haven’t eaten yet. Come on, let’s find somewhere to go.’

  The thought of intimate conversation across a table suddenly filled me with panic. ‘D’you know what I really feel like?’ I said quickly. ‘Fish and chips.’

  Douglas laughed. ‘There was I thinking of something really sophisticated. Oh well – fish and chips, then. At least we don’t need our ration books for that.’

  We crossed the busy station forecourt, both starting to talk at once and trailing off into embarrassed laughter.

  ‘You first,’ I said.

  ‘Look – ’ His handsome face grew serious and rather rueful. ‘I’m sorry for not looking you up before. I’ve thought a lot about you since I saw you. It was a bit of a failure of courage on my part, I’m afraid.’

  I was disarmed by this admission. ‘I’m so glad you did get in touch. It’s very good to see you again.’ And I mean
t it, I had forgotten how attractive he was, with his combination of wit and vulnerability.

  ‘Your father – ’ Douglas turned to look at me. ‘It must have been a terrible blow to you. What happened?’

  ‘His heart gave out. Overwork, I suppose. He’s always had quite good health actually but he worked so hard, and since the war started he’s not let up at all.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Douglas said again. As we stepped outside he laid a hand gently on my shoulder to guide me through the crowds at the door.

  We carried our warm newspaper parcels, strolling down through what remained of the Bull Ring. It was a melancholy sight in the half light, quieter than it would ever have been in peacetime, the bombed shells of buildings round us filled with queer shadows. Droves of starlings circled the wreckage of St Martin’s, shrieking sadly.

  A couple of boys appeared out of the gloom, tearing past us.

  ‘Peg-a-leg!’ they shouted at Douglas. ‘Cripple!’ They disappeared behind us.

  ‘D’you want to catch the bus?’ Douglas asked ruefully.

  I felt embarrassed for him. ‘I was rather enjoying walking – that’s if it’s not difficult for you. Does it hurt to walk?’

  ‘Oh, no – no pain,’ he said, his sardonic voice back again. ‘I just look like an inebriated clown as soon as I set foot, that’s all. In present company I’d enjoy a walk too. That’s if you don’t mind being seen out with me?’

  ‘Of course I don’t mind. You mustn’t think that.’

  ‘I get a fair bit of what we’ve just heard.’ He jerked his thumb in the direction the boys had gone.

  ‘It must be ghastly.’

  ‘Oh, don’t you start!’ he protested cheerfully. ‘I can stand the abuse, but for heaven’s sake don’t pity me.’

  ‘OK. Subject closed.’

  We cut up along Cheapside, climbing the steep slope up to Camp Hill. Douglas chatted about work, performing such comical impersonations of his colleagues that they came alive in front of me, and soon I was laughing as I’d begun to think I’d never laugh again. I felt warmed by the thick chips and crisp battered fish, and temporarily uplifted. It was a still evening, with the last waning light of summer. The factories throbbed on either side of us, their high grimy sides towering over us, half muffled by sandbags. A truck reversed out from a gate in front of us and roared off up the road.