by Annie Murray
‘Rationing starts today,’ Mom said, though I could hardly have missed the fact since Gloria had been on and on about it. The week’s ration was to be: bacon, 4 oz.; butter, 4 oz.; sugar, 12 oz. We were already registered with all the right people. Thank heavens we were with another butcher and not Harris’s, I thought with a shudder. Didn’t need my nose rubbed in it.
‘We’ll have to make sure we don’t have that Molly over every five minutes, living off our ration,’ Mom said. She was ironing at the table. Now there was an unusual sight. I should’ve had a photographer in. ‘She seems to be coming over here a lot.’
She didn’t know the half of it. Molly was over just about every evening when Mom was out at the telephone exchange. She seemed to have got out of Gladys’s clutches, and instead of being dragged into premature old age had decided to live. The dabs of rouge got thicker. She brought boiled sweets. She had a cousin worked over at Cadbury’s and got her cheap chocolate so she brought that along as well and saved all the best bits for Len, even some with nuts in. Once Len was home from work he and Molly parked themselves in front of Gloria for the evening, enormous in their chairs, sucking and champing away on barley sugars and Dairy Milk with serene smiles on their faces. They never said much to each other. Barely a word in fact. Whatever was on, they listened. The Nine O’Clock News, they tuned into Haw-Haw, concerts, records, ITMA. They cheered the house up no end, chuckling away when anyone laughed on the wireless, Molly’s titties heaving up and down. I thought how their dimensions suited each other.
And Gloria had just given us a new treat: the Forces Programme which was put on for the lads in France, but we could tune into it at home as well. I wondered if Dad’d hear it and felt cheered by the thought that he might. It was like a link with him. Gloria’s music was the one thing that could lift my spirits on these chill, dreary days. All those bandleaders, their music like shiny sparkling trails through the house, making you want to sing, to move your body – Geraldo, Joe Loss, Ray Noble, Glenn Miller. I was in love with them all, though I had no idea whether any of them looked like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. And my Anne Shelton, and the Mills Brothers with those sweet, melancholy voices. I wanted to be tucked into bed by ‘Goodnight Sweetheart’ and dance till I was drunk on happiness to ‘In the Mood’. They did what they did for me, for Len, for Molly, and for countless other people. They made life worth living.
It started snowing. I say snowing. It was snow such as I’d never seen in my life before. Heaps and swathes and layers and banks of it clogging up the town and blown across the parks. The old’uns were all saying, ‘Can’t remember snow like this since . . .’ – though each of them seemed to recall a different date. Gloria said it was turning into the worst winter for forty-five years. Everything was muffled and the sky seemed to sink lower as if it was creaking under the weight of it all. Buses, already crawling along in the handicap of the blackout, were now going so slowly they were almost going backwards. Everyone was even friendlier than usual and Mom had to buy herself a new pair of boots to get to and from work.
‘Feels safer somehow, doesn’t it?’ Mom said, when the snow had been falling for some time. ‘As if they couldn’t get at us with all this wrapped round.’ She stood staring out of the back window.
‘It’s so cold though.’ I was crouched by the fire, turning this way and that to try and feel the warmth on every bit of me. ‘I was frozen in bed last night. Where’s that crocheted blanket of Nan’s gone?’
Mom picked up her bag and started fiddling inside it. ‘What blanket?’
‘You know. The yellow one.’
Mom shrugged and made a show of checking through her coins. ‘It’s so flaming dark on the bus you can’t see what change they’re giving you . . . Maybe Len’s got it.’
Since Len had already gone I couldn’t ask him, but there was no sign of it on his bed.
‘That strip of baize we had in the front room’s gone too,’ I told her.
Mom frowned. ‘D’you think that Molly’s light-fingered?’
‘No, I don’t.’ The thought hadn’t crossed my mind. It was hard to imagine Molly being light-anythinged. ‘I s’pose it’ll turn up.’
One night Len and Molly started kissing. After some sign between the two of them which I must have missed, Len knelt down on the floor in front of her. Molly spread her legs apart to let him come near and they locked their lips together. And that was that. For ages. I was ever so embarrassed. Seeing people kissing like that’s enough to make you jump out of a window even from the top floor, and they didn’t care whether I was there or not. They didn’t even notice.
But what could I do? Len had his eyes shut and Molly’s brawny hands were clamped behind his back, so I went into the kitchen and did the washing up. Mom would’ve had a fit if she’d known about them. But then who was she to complain? Everyone else seemed to be at it, so why shouldn’t Molly and Len have a go, even if they were both as thick as butter? So I just left them to it.
When I crept back in later Molly was sitting on Len’s lap. She beamed at me, her red face pressed against Len’s, and he was in some sort of dreamy trance as well.
‘Awright, Genie?’ Molly said. ‘Don’t mind us, will you?’
‘D’you want a cuppa tea?’
‘Ooh yes,’ Molly gasped, as if she’d just run ten times round the block. She lurched off of Len’s knee. ‘I made a few biscuits – ’ere.’
She handed me a paper bag containing four crumbly biscuits. ‘Two for Lenny,’ she said, planting herself opposite him.
Soon after there was a loud hammering at the front. The three of us looked at each other.
‘Stay in your own chairs,’ I said, running to answer it.
Lil was in a right state. Her coat collar was pulled up round her throat and her hair and shoulders sparkled with snow.
‘It’s taken me a bleeding age to get here,’ she panted, steaming in past me. When we got into the back her eyes looked darting and scared. ‘It’s your nan. She had a fall earlier and they’ve taken her up the hospital. She’s done summat to her leg. Where’s Doreen?’
‘Work.’
‘Course. I’d forgotten you’re on your own every evening.’ She nodded at Molly. ‘Len – our mom’s hurt her leg. Fell on the ice.’ She spoke slowly so he’d take it all in. Molly made some sympathetic noises and then, surprisingly, seeing she’d be in the way, took herself off home.
‘I’ll wait and tell Doreen,’ Lil said.
It was ten o’clock. ‘She should be half an hour or so.’
Lil went and stood by the fire. ‘Jaysus, my legs are shaking.’ After a moment she burst into tears and sank into a chair. ‘I’ve never seen Mom like that,’ she sobbed. ‘She was on the corner of Moseley Road. She’d been to see Mrs Briggs – the one who’s got pleurisy – and she fell on the way back. When they came to get me she was lying there making this horrible noise. I can’t get it out of my mind. It was the pain – she sounded like a dog whimpering. Someone from the hotel got her an ambulance and it took ages and ages to come. Mom went quiet and I thought she was dead.’
I went and knelt down by Lil and watched her, wondering if I should take her hand. I was scared. Len sat, looking stunned.
‘It’s all right.’ Lil looked quickly across at him. ‘She’s not dead. She’ll be OK. She’s done summat to her knee. But when they put her on the stretcher to go in the ambulance, someone shone a torch in her face and she looked so old and her eyes were full of fear. I’ve never seen her like that before.’
She was sobbing even harder now. I felt so sorry for her and for our nan I nearly started crying myself. I went and poured her a cup of tea. She hadn’t even taken her coat off and was still hunched up in its grey, prickly warmth.
‘You said Nan’s going to be all right, didn’t you?’ I asked cautiously. I felt very young suddenly. I wasn’t exactly sure what was up with Lil but I put it down to shock. Len leaned forward and took her hand and Lil suddenly threw herself into his arms, laying her he
ad on his big strong chest.
‘I hate being on my own,’ she cried in a desolate voice. ‘I want my Patsy back. I want him so bad. Why did he have to do it?’ She tried to say a few more things that got lost in sobs and gulps. Len rocked her back and forth. ‘I can’t stand it,’ Lil said. ‘I can’t go on. I need someone to be with. I hate sleeping in a lonely bed every night and doing all the worrying for all of us on my own. It’s too much, day after day. How’m I going to manage now?’
When she’d calmed down a bit I said, ‘Who’s with the kids?’
‘Mary, from next door.’ That was a sign of how bad things were if she’d entrusted her kids to Mary Flanagan.
Lil suddenly seemed to lose all the energy that had driven her here in such a state. She sniffed, sat quiet back in her chair and drank her tea. But it was still all going round in her mind because after a while she said, ‘Mom won’t be able to manage. I’ll have to give up work and run the shop.’ She sighed. ‘I hate that bloody factory, but I’m making better money now than I’ve ever done in my life.’
‘Or I could,’ I said. It sounded like a nice idea to me. There was no point in suggesting my own dear mother. I knew that just wasn’t going to happen.
‘I can’t move out now,’ Lil said gloomily, only half hearing me. ‘Not even if they offer me a council house. I’ll be stuck in Belgrave Road for ever.’
‘No you won’t. Nan’ll get better.’
Lil looked at me, dark eyes filling again. ‘When she was laid there in the road I saw what it’d be like without her at home. And I thought how she’s had it hard, what with me coming back to live and Len . . . And Doreen and me not getting on. I wanted to make it up to her. She’s been a good mom to us . . .’ And she was off again.
The mantel clock said ten twenty-five. ‘Mom’ll be in soon,’ I said, desperately.
But she wasn’t. We all sat and waited. Lil was tapping her foot on the tiles round the hearth. By a quarter to eleven I had this nasty suspicion turning round in my mind.
‘Probably the weather,’ I said.
Ten more minutes passed and I was getting in a panic. How could she, tonight of all nights? She had to be somewhere with PC Bob, but I couldn’t tell Lil that because the most God Almighty amount of shit would hit the fan if she was to find out about that, specially the state she was in tonight. I sat tensed with terror at the thought of hearing the front door and Mom, in her flirty voice, asking Bob in for a drink.
Once it reached ten past eleven Lil stood up. ‘I’ll have to go and let Mary get home. What the hell’s happened to her? Is she often this late?’
‘Oh, sometimes she is,’ I said quickly, praying Len wasn’t going to say anything.
‘Will you be all right?’
‘We’ll be OK, just as normal,’ I said. I was nearly laughing with relief that Lil was going. ‘I’ll tell her, soon as she gets in.’
When I opened the door to let Lil out Mom was standing on the other side of it with a kind of smirk on her face which she wiped off right quick when she saw us.
‘What’s the matter? What’re you doing here?’
When Lil told her, Mom was about as upset and flustered as she deserved to be. We all stood crushed into the hall.
‘I’ll go straight up the hospital and see her tomorrow,’ Mom said. She hadn’t taken her coat off either.
‘Visiting’s afternoons,’ Lil told her in a chilly voice.
‘Oh – well, Genie can go after work, can’t you love?’
I was going anyhow. Didn’t need her sending me.
Lil disappeared along the road, her muffled torch playing on the icy ground. I shut the door carefully and turned round and stared at Mom. She had guilt not just written, but carved in massive gullies all over her face.
Eventually, with a shrug, she said, ‘We just went out for a drink.’
I kept staring really hard at her eyes. How could she? How could she?’
‘What, Genie?’ Her face went all sharp and spiteful. ‘I didn’t know, did I? How could I know what was going to happen? Don’t barge past me like that . . .’
I’d heard enough of her already.
‘I have too much of your cheek sometimes . . .’ she shouted up after me.
I didn’t say another word. Just went up and shivered myself to sleep in bed wishing to God I could have a new life, new family, new everything.
The next morning brought a blue sky without blemish, grey clouds wiped away and the sun brilliant on the snow. Before Mom was up I opened the back door and went out. From the kitchen to the privy the snow had been well stamped down by us tramping back and forth. No one, so far as I knew, should have walked on the thick pie crust of snow towards the bottom of the garden where the Anderson sat smooth and rounded as an igloo. But of course I found footprints, not filled in by any night snow, leading from the side gate to and from the shelter. Two sets. I followed them, pressing my feet into the bigger ones with their rugged prints. Round the door of the shelter it’d all been stamped down. There was a cleft in the snow at the edge of the roof as if someone had rested their hand there.
I pulled the door away and looked inside. In the confined space a piece of thick canvas had been laid out to cover the frozen floor. On top of it were a Tilley lamp, a variety of covers and materials: a thick grey blanket I’d never seen before, the strip of green baize, a couple of pillows and the yellow, orange and green crocheted blanket of Nan’s which had long been missing from the back room.
February 1940
Life got a bit better after that because Lil took up my offer and I said goodbye to Jimmy the Joiner and Shirl, and went to look after my nan and help run her shop.
She was properly laid up and Lil was earning better money than me. I was happy. Nan let me come and go as I needed to. She understood about Mom. Not Mom and Bob of course – I hadn’t said a word to anyone about that. Just about the way Mom used me.
‘She don’t deserve you,’ she said to me, laid back on the horsehair sofa with her leg, rigid in its plaster cast, stuck out in front of her. She’d done some horrible thing to her knee.
‘Summat to do with cart-lidge they said up the ’ospital. They say it’ll take weeks to heal. Flaming nuisance.’
It’d knocked the stuffing out of her. Her face looked thinner and more lined. Sometimes I found her asleep, head lolling back on the sofa, which was unheard of for her as a rule. But she was always on her dignity. She’d never come down in her nightclothes. When I arrived in the morning she was always dressed. I suppose she must have hoisted herself up off the bed to put her dress on, rolling a stocking up her good leg – good except for the ulcer dressings. She always sat and pinned up her hair.
‘I’ve taken to coming downstairs on my backside,’ she said. ‘I’m not up to hopping at my age.’
I looked after her as if she was a queen, which she was in my eyes, as she’d never been anything but good to me. I wasn’t the only one who thought so – the neighbours drifted in and out of the back door like flies, wanting to know if she needed anything. Hot-tempered, red-headed Mary Flanagan came almost every hour trailing an assortment of her seven kids behind her. She’d tried evacuating them once but they’d all come home.
‘You awright there, Edith?’ she’d say. ‘You shout me if you need anything.’
And in the shop it was always, ‘How’s Mrs Rawson?’ and then they’d say, ‘I bet she’s glad of your ’elp, bab. I couldn’t borrow you for a bit, could I?’
‘You’re golden,’ Nan said to me sometimes, watching me work. I scrubbed her quarry tiles on my hands and knees. I blackleaded the grate, did her washing in the brewhouse when it was our turn, and hung it steaming across the freezing yard. I cooked for her, I ran errands, I scuttled back and forth to the shop whenever we heard the click of the door opening and the bell ringing out.
I felt grown up. I’d just turned sixteen after all, even if that hadn’t been much of an event. I served in the shop. I sorted stock, arranging jars of sherbet lemons and th
roat drops – there were still sweets to be had then – and bars of Lifebuoy and blue Reckitt’s powder in packets and piles of enamel buckets. It was peaceful in there most of the time, except once or twice a week when Morgan made his forays through to the upstairs with a selection of trollops in tow. Once the girls arrived there were bangs and squeaks of the floor and giggles and thumps from the bug-ridden rooms upstairs. It was no good suggesting to Nan that she move. There was a time when I just didn’t understand this attitude. But it was so much part of the fabric of life at her house I barely gave it a thought now. There was Nan, and there was Morgan. That’s how it was. Nan would roll her eyes to the ceiling and tut a bit at the louder noises, but we mostly just had to ignore them. Besides, people being the nosy so-and-sos they are, the trollops were surprisingly good for business.
I adopted Nan’s policy towards Morgan, that he was like a mote of dirt passing through, unseen under my nose. That is until he started coming in a bit early – before his girls – and fixing his pale eyes on my chest.
‘’Allo my dear,’ he’d say, wiping his sweaty forehead with a hanky. The strips of hair hung down like pondweed. ‘You are growing up fast, aren’t you?’
‘Nan, he keeps talking to me,’ I reported.
‘Right,’ she said.
Next time he turned up, sneaking in and pussyfooting about instead of going upstairs, grinning at me with yellow smoker’s teeth, Nan’s voice roared through from the back.
‘You filthy bastard, Morgan!’ He actually jumped. It had more impact her being invisible, like God’s voice out of a cave. ‘You as much as speak to my granddaughter again and I’ll ’ave your bollocks twisted round the back of your neck!’
‘No offence intended, my dear,’ Morgan said to me, retreating hurriedly to the stairs.
I kept the place immaculate, took people’s money or filled in the strap book so they could pay later. I checked with Nan. She knew them all and trusted most of them. She’d been known to land a punch on the jaw for bad debts. I tore round the place like a whirlwind and I loved it. I was doing it for my nan and I could decide what I wanted to do and when and do it as fast as I liked. I had a fierce mixture of anger and love inside me and I was like a fury.
