Birmingham Blitz

by Annie Murray

  ‘She never! What the hell’d she do that for?’

  ‘She was the worse for it – the drink, you know.’

  ‘She drink a bit then, does she?’

  ‘Yep. Don’t blame her. If I was married to a bastard like my dad I’d get kalied all the time as well.’

  ‘What’s he like then?’

  Jimmy dug a dirty thumbnail into his apple. ‘Our mom relies on him, see, not being able to ’ear. And he treats her like the lowest form of life. Brought the clap ’ome to her once – never been the same since, she ’asn’t. She was expecting a kid at the time too. She lost that one.’ Jimmy took a big bite of the apple. ‘If he died I’d cheer.’

  I watched him, glad at least to feel something for him again, even if it was only sorry. Some fellow feeling. And I was hoping at last here was someone who would understand what was on my mind.

  ‘My mom . . .’ It was costing me to speak and I wasn’t even sure he was listening. ‘She’s going with another bloke. Brings him to our house. I hate him.’

  Jimmy said nothing, just munched on the apple.

  ‘It’s horrible, isn’t it?’ I persevered, watching his pale face.

  Jimmy hurled the apple core away over into the trees. ‘Come on. Let’s do it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The whole thing. Fucking. Properly.’

  ‘Jimmy!’ The very word gave me the heebie-jeebies. It sounded so rude. ‘You don’t use words like that.’

  He was shuffling closer to me. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Should think you are. It’s not nice.’ I was sitting clenched up tight, knees against my chest.

  Jimmy slunk his arm round my back. ‘What d’you want me to say instead?’

  ‘Something nice and romantic. Say how you feel about me.’

  ‘Well, you’re all right, you are. I’ve told you. I like you, Genie.’

  ‘But d’you feel anything more than that? D’you love me, Jimmy?’ It felt important that he did, that it wasn’t just One Thing he was after.

  His face loomed closer. ‘Yeah, OK Genie. I love you. Now give us a kiss.’

  I gave a big sigh. What price affection. He kissed me for some time, then undid a couple of the buttons on the front of my dress and wriggled his fingers inside.

  ‘Don’t,’ I tried to say, but he wasn’t having it. He squeezed until I squeaked with pain. I was mortified. Didn’t want his hand down my dress. His eyes had started rolling about and he looked so queer with his white face close to me and his body rocking up and down beside me as if he had a horse under him.

  There’s got to be more to it than this. Lil hadn’t had those dreamy eyes on her just for this. And how long’d we got to sit here doing it for? What a complete waste of the afternoon when we could’ve been out in the sun. And then I started thinking about home, Mom and Bob doing this. I felt sick.

  Jimmy started fumbling about in his clothes. ‘’Ere,’ he said, ‘’ave a feel of this. This is ’ow much I want you.’

  He yanked at my hand, rubbed it against him.

  ‘No!’ I said, pulling away. It felt hot and sticky. ‘Don’t be dirty.’

  He scowled. ‘All right then. If you’re going to be like that, we’ll do it another way.’

  Hands on my shoulders, he shoved me back so my head was in a pile of leaves and twigs. He pulled my dress up and got his hand down my knickers, poking around hard and clumsily. Lying along me, half on, half off, he ground his body up and down, faster and faster. It didn’t take long. He tensed up, eyes squeezed shut, hurting me with his hand and I called out in pain.

  When he got off, my blue dress was all wet and sticky.

  ‘You pig,’ I said. ‘You horrible, disgusting pig.’

  ‘Go on.’ He half turned away, buttoning himself up again. ‘That’s what you wanted. Next time I’ll give it to you proper.’

  I felt very cold suddenly, and shivery, sat huddled up, clutching my knees tight. The world was a nasty mean place.

  ‘Let’s go. You wanted a walk, didn’t you? Bit of sun on your face?’

  I spread out the skirt of my dress, all gluey and wrinkled. ‘What’s my mom going to say?’

  Casually, Jimmy picked up one of the stera bottles we’d brought our tea in. It was a third full still, and he poured the rest of it in my lap. The blood-warm tea seeped through and trickled between my thighs.

  ‘There y’are. Now she’ll never know the difference, will she?’

  ‘There’s no need for you to keep my nan company no more,’ I told Shirl. ‘I’m not going to be seeing Jimmy again.’

  ‘Oh.’ The smile dropped off Shirl’s face but I was too wrapped up in my own mortification to take in how downcast she looked.

  ‘Got fed up of ’im, ’ave you? Thought you would. Not got a lot going on upstairs, ’as ’e?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘So – you don’t need me round then? I mean I don’t mind . . .’

  ‘No,’ I said, very short with her. ‘There’s no need to put yourself out any more.’

  She took me at my word and walked out of our lives again. I didn’t give it a lot of thought then because it was absolute mayhem up at Nan’s, with Lil’s lot and the Flanagans roaring in and out. Nan was getting better. She was taking over from me again day by day and I knew I’d soon be booted back out into the working world. She bore the Flanagans with her usual stoicism – ‘The Corporation’ll sort them out a place soon enough.’

  But it was Lil who was doing her nut. The price of fags had gone up by a ha’penny a packet, the government was behind the factories to up production (especially aircraft – Len was on extra long shifts) and to cap it all the house was nearly full to bursting.

  ‘Your life’s never your own,’ she moaned regularly. ‘At work you don’t have time to turn round hardly and when I get home I can’t see across the room for mad bloody kids.’

  And the Flanagans were wild. After all, we only had two of them, but the mess they made was indescribable. The boys were bedwetters, so there were smelly sheets to be dealt with every day, dirty clothes left in heaps, Patsy, Tom and Cathleen’s things all turned upside down and scattered round the place, and the constant noise of them charging in and out. Mary seemed helpless to control them, try as she might. How the hell did she cope normally? we wondered. They started to make Lil’s kids look like angels with haloes.

  It was getting Lil down and I felt sorry for her. She was growing sourer by the day and I thought she deserved better.

  I went to see Vera Spini one day. The shop was quiet and she was out the back making ice cream, her face sagging with exhaustion. She wore a white cap on her head to keep her hair out of the way.

  ‘Let me help, Mrs Spini,’ I said, going to the churning handle.

  They boiled the ice-cream mixture in the copper until it was like custard, which stood overnight covered with muslin cloths to keep any flies out. The next day it’d go in the churning machine, a long cylinder which was kept cool by electricity. There were blades inside to turn it round and it got paler and paler yellow, smelling sweet and turning into food from heaven when you were used to lumpy tapioca.

  ‘How’s Mr Spini?’

  ‘Not too good.’ She stopped turning and pulled the cap off. Her pale hair was dark at the roots as if it was planted in soil. ‘He hasn’t managed to do anything much for the past two weeks. I’m ever so worried about him, Genie.’

  She wiped her dry, workworn hands on a cloth and tried to force a smile. I’d never seen her do that before. Not force it. But there were no songs on her lips today, no hymns or Santa Lucia.

  ‘Here, come and see him. He’ll be glad to have a bit of company.’

  ‘Me?’

  Vera looked at me in surprise. ‘Course. He’d love to see you. He’s got a real soft spot for you, Genie. Always has had.’

  This was news to me all right and it didn’t stop me feeling scared. I’d hardly ever seen Micky without Teresa around.

  ‘Stevie!’ Vera shouted into the
yard. ‘Come up front for a bit, will you? I’ll not be long.’

  In the house, Micky was sitting by the fire huddled in his coat, watching Luke push an old wooden horse with rough little wheels along the floor. His body looked thinner, his face was drawn and sick looking and he had several days’ worth of greying stubble on his cheeks. There was a newspaper on the table and a cup with tea dregs in it.

  ‘Genie!’ He really did look pleased to see me and I felt warmed by it. In fact he looked nothing like as stern as usual. ‘Come and have a sit down with me. I’m stuck here, useless to everyone at the moment.’

  ‘You’re telling me,’ Vera mocked him.

  ‘Feeling any better, Mr Spini?’ I asked, perching on the edge of a chair by the table.

  ‘A bit.’ He ran a hand over his wavy, pepper and salt hair and nodded insistently at his wife. ‘I do. She don’t believe me. Makes you think though. I don’t know what was in that smoke but it nearly did for me, I tell you.’ And he was off, coughing again. He didn’t sound well, whatever he said.

  Vera stayed long enough to brew up a pot of tea, sugaring a cup for Micky and placing it tenderly on the table beside him before going back to the shop.

  ‘You got time to sit for a bit?’ Micky asked.

  I nodded.

  ‘It’s very nice. Long time since you sat and had a chat. Now you’re a working girl.’ He laughed, then coughed. I couldn’t say I ever remembered sitting having a chat before, but I wasn’t going to argue. But what in heaven were we going to talk about?

  ‘You OK, Genie? Everything all right at home?’

  ‘Yes,’ I lied.

  He looked into my eyes with his dark ones for a moment then stared at the back of the door which Vera had closed for once.

  ‘I’ve been sat here all this time – so I’ve been thinking. Never get the time on a normal day.’ He stopped. I waited for him to keep talking, not sure if I was meant to ask, and then I saw he was struggling to keep from coughing.

  ‘I remembered something from when I was a little boy in Italy – about seven or eight. I had a special place for myself. No one else knew about it.’ He stirred the tea and took a sip, slurping it. ‘Of course everyone knew about it – but no one except me knew it was special. Our village was outside Castellamare, and the church where we said Mass was high on the cliff and the land round it looked out over the water – that’s the Mediterranean Sea. Beautiful blue it is. There were a few trees on that piece of land and one was an olive tree with a very old, twisted trunk where I used to go and sit. It was at the far end, away from the church, so the old ladies who came in and out to clean the church or say their rosary couldn’t see I was there. I used to feel the trunk of the tree behind my back and the land in front of it sort of dipped down towards the sea. There’d be salamanders – little lizards – running up the tree and there were crickets in the grass. You ever heard the noise crickets make, Genie?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘The grass was a dry, wiry kind that scratched at the back of your legs. Sometimes I sat there as long as an hour, hoping no bigger boys would come and find me. The sky was always blue – that’s how I remember it, and you could smell salt on the wind. And because I was alone and all I could see was sea and grass and sky it gave me room for all these dreams to pass through my head. I felt very big sitting up there, as if I owned all the world and I could do anything I wanted.’

  He laughed again suddenly as if he’d said something daft, because he never talked like this normally. Certainly wouldn’t have done to his own kids. The laugh ended in a long bout of coughing and his lungs sounded as if they were half full of liquid. Each breath was a strain for air and his face went red. Luke stared up at him. When it’d passed he said, ‘D’you have a place like that, Genie?’

  I shook my head. ‘There’s no room for that here, is there?’

  Micky tapped his head with one thick finger. ‘There is in here.’

  I thought of my house all for me, by the river with fields and trees and flowers. ‘I s’pose I do then, yes. Only it’s not real.’

  ‘It don’t matter. When I want to dream of something outside all these houses so close together I can go back to my tree. So you’re looking at a crazy bloke who spends his morning sitting under a tree thousands of miles away!’ He seemed embarrassed now, after saying all that. Luke jumped up and pulled at his father’s leg and Micky lifted him up on to his lap, Luke watching him with a finger in his mouth.

  Seeing the newspaper on the table, Micky picked it up and handed it to me. ‘Here – another good reason for sitting under a tree.’

  It was the Mirror. With a black-rimmed nail, Micky pointed to one column:

  There are more than twenty thousand Italians in Great Britain. The . . . Italian is an indigestible unit of population . . .

  Even the peaceful, law-abiding proprietor of the back street coffee shop bounces into a patriotic frenzy at the sound of Mussolini’s name . . .

  ‘In Italy we have the Fascio,’ Micky explained. ‘The Fascist Party, pretty much like the German Nazis. So they think that because we are Italian we must support Mussolini . . . I can’t think of anyone now who is a supporter – well, except young Pirelli, or he likes to think so anyhow . . .’ Micky shook his head.

  I read the last part of the newspaper column: ‘We are nicely honeycombed with little cells of potential betrayal.’

  ‘But what does it mean?’

  He must have seen the worry on my face because he reached over and patted my arm. ‘I hope it don’t mean nothing. I’ve been here far too long to worry about.

  ‘Come and see me again if you get time, eh?’ he said, as I got up to leave. ‘I’ll be on my feet soon. Oh – and by the way, Genie. Teresa. She getting up to anything she shouldn’t be?’

  I shook my head, panic stricken. Why did people have to keep asking me such blooming awkward questions?

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  He looked into my eyes for a moment, then smiled. ‘All right, love. Thanks for coming to see me.’

  I wanted to say something nice but couldn’t think of anything. In fact what I really wanted to do was go and put my arms round him for being kind, for making me feel special. I didn’t do it, but I knew I’d never see Micky Spini in the same way again.

  ‘Tara,’ was all I said. ‘Hope you get better soon.’

  Mary Flanagan’s kids were not the easiest to get to bed. I’d thought of Mary as someone intimidating, forever yelling and carrying on, until she moved in with my nan and I saw her trying to control her kids. It was pitiful.

  One night when I was round there the tension of having two families living under one roof was reaching breaking point and although the Corporation had promised to rehouse Mary ‘at the earliest possible opportunity’ so far there was no date.

  ‘Get up there and stay where I put you or you’ll be feeling my hand across you again,’ Mary was bawling up the stairs in her deep, throaty voice for about the tenth time. Downstairs I was trying to deal with the devastation the kids had caused while they were still up.

  Lil sat on the couch chewing her nails as if she’d like to gnash someone’s head off. I could tell she was bubbling inside like a boiler about to explode. She was a stickler for getting her own kids to bed in good time, and once they were there, that was where they stayed, and no messing.

  Not long after, despite Mary’s threats and pleas and bribes, we could still hear feet padding back and forth upstairs, then the clattering and squeaking of the bed-frame as the two boys bounced on and off it like little rubber acrobats.

  Nan and I exchanged glances in the scullery.

  Lil suddenly snapped. ‘Christ Almighty, would you listen to them! They’ll be waking Cathleen again if they carry on like that. What’s the matter with them? Why the hell can’t you get them to do as they’re told? They’re like bloody animals.’

  ‘I’m doing my best,’ Mary snapped from the bottom of the stairs. ‘Don’t you talk about my kids like that. Eamo
nn, Colm – I’m coming up to give you a hiding so I am!’

  ‘They’re unsettled,’ Nanny Rawson said. She was washing up, I was wiping. ‘Poor kids’ve been split up. They’re not used to it.’

  ‘I don’t bloody well care.’ Lil was on her feet, brown eyes darkened further with fury. ‘I’ve had enough of it. If they come to live in our house they should do as they’re told. We want some peace, no sodding kids running round the place all evening. Some of us have a job of work to do as well you know!’

  Suddenly there were wails from upstairs. ‘That’s it!’ Lil exploded. ‘That’s Cathleen. Move, will you.’ She pushed past Mary who was at the foot of the stairs. ‘They’ve really done it now.’

  ‘Don’t you touch my kids!’ Mary spat at Lil’s back, following her up the stairs.

  ‘I wouldn’t touch your poxy kids if they were the last ones on earth. I’m going to see to mine now they’ve cowing well gone and woken her up.’ But as she passed through the boys’ room we heard her bawl at them, ‘GET INTO BED AND STAY THERE YOU LITTLE BASTARDS’ at the top of her voice as she went up to Cathleen.

  We could hear Cathleen’s weary, half-awake screams downstairs, and it took Lil some time to get her settled again. Eventually she came back down, but the Flanagan boys were still up there tripping the light fantastic with Mary yelling helplessly at them.

  ‘At least Cathleen’s gone off again,’ Lil said through clenched teeth. ‘I just can’t stand any more of this, I really can’t. Come on, Genie, I’ll take you home.’

  ‘It’s hardly even dark,’ I protested. ‘I’ll be all right.’ My mind was doing gambols over and over, trying to think what time it was and what exactly might be going on at home.

  ‘It’s only nine.’ Lil glanced at the clock. ‘I can take you along and sit with you for a while. Have a bit of peace out of this madhouse.’ Lil was already walking out into the spring evening.

  ‘Just drop me at the door,’ I said. ‘I’ll be all right – really. I’ve walked back much later than this.’

  ‘Do I smell or summat? I’ve told you – I’ll come and keep you company. See Len. Wait till her in there’s got her act together.’