The Burning Summer

by Claire Rayner

  Of course, there was still the trouble with the wet beds at night, and when she went to sleep on the camp bed in the shelter, her mother made her wrap up in an old macintosh, so that the wetness didn’t go over her and Leon, and the macintosh smelled nasty, and made her very hot and itchy, but she got used to it.

  One afternoon, a week or so after Mrs Levy had been killed, Ruthie was playing in the street with a ball. It was a very nice ball, with yellow and red and green and blue on it, all mixed up together in swirly stripes, and when Ruthie bounced it, all the colours shivered together and looked very beautiful. She was trying to do One Two Three Alairy, My ball went down the airy, lifting her leg over the ball between bounces. Lilian was very good at this, and Ruthie was practising it a lot, though it was very difficult. On the third try, the ball hit the edge of the kerb, and went rolling very quickly along the street towards Mrs Cohen’s. She ran after it, and caught it just by the way into the alleyway that led to Festival Street.

  It was always a bit dark in the alleyway, and cool, and Ruthie looked along it because she liked the way the light at the other end sparkled against the dimness of the alleyway walls. She could see the four big girls there, Mrs Salmon’s Esther, and Rachel Kaye, who was a bit slow, and Shirley and Sandra who were sisters. They were standing very close together, and they were giggling and pushing each other about the way they did when they were playing doctors and told Ruthie she was too little to play with them.

  Ruthie looked at them, and thought it would be nice to play with them today. Lilian didn’t play with her as much as she had once, not since the day she had spat at Ruthie, because Ruthie was a bit frightened she would spit again, and Lilian seemed to know Ruthie was frightened and was nasty to her.

  So Ruthie walked into the alleyway, holding her ball, and came to stand next to the girls. They took no notice of her, because there was someone else there they were looking at while they giggled and pushed at each other.

  It was a man, someone Ruthie hadn’t ever seen before. He was a tall man, thin, with a bent back, and his face had a lot of pimples on it. He had thin fair hair, not a nice yellow like Lilian’s or Ruthie’s mother after she had used the toothbrush on it, but a thin pale sort of colour, all flat, without any shine on it, and it hung over his eyes. His mouth was a bit open, and stretched in a funny sort of way, not exactly a smile, not exactly like the way your mouth stretched when you were trying not to cry, but a bit of each.

  He was standing with his hands in front of him, fiddling with something Ruthie couldn’t see properly, something that looked greyish in the dim light of the alleyway, and Ruthie moved forwards a bit so that she could see properly. But she still couldn’t understand what he was doing; all she could see was that he had unbuttoned the front of his trousers, and whatever it was he was holding was part of his trousers, or so it looked.

  And then Esther giggled again, a breathless sort of giggle that sounded bubbly as though it came from her throat, and Ruthie moved her eyes away from the man and looked at her. Esther had very big black eyes, with very long eyelashes, and her eyes were the sort that stuck out a bit. They were shining now, shining in the dark alleyway, and her mouth was half open, and looked wet, as though she had just licked her lips. Her face was flushed, and there was a sort of glassy look in her shiny eyes that made Ruthie feel very frightened suddenly.

  So she looked away from Esther’s face at the others. But they were the same, all staring at the man’s hands and trousers, all with the wet look on their mouths, all very bright-eyed. Only Rachel looked a bit different, Rachel whose mouth always hung open a bit, who behaved like a baby sometimes though she was thirteen last birthday. Rachel was swaying backwards and forwards, very evenly, her eyes never leaving the man’s hands. Looking at her, Ruthie felt suddenly very frightened indeed. She wanted to turn and run away up the alley, back to the sunshine of Aspen Street to play One Two Three Alairy again, but she couldn’t go on her own, couldn’t turn her back on the four girls, in case they looked at her with those horrible shiny eyes, in case they followed her and giggled in her ear with that horrible bubbly giggle. So she stood very still, staring at the four girls, taking no notice of the man leaning against the wall with his hands in front of him and his trousers all unbuttoned.

  And then Rachel moved forwards towards the man, her eyes all flat and shiny, and put her hand out towards him. The man made a funny squeaking noise in his throat, and pushed himself back against the wall as though he were frightened of her, too, like Ruthie, and this time, Ruthie couldn’t stay, even if by turning her back on the girls it meant they would look at her. She ran up the alleyway as fast as she could, feeling her mouth go stiff and stretched the way it did when she tried not to cry, holding her ball very hard in her hand.

  Mrs Cohen was outside her shop as she came bursting out of the alleyway, fixing another tin of broken biscuits on the shelf in front of the shop window, and when Ruthie came near to her, she stared at her, and dropping the biscuit tin, grabbed at her with one fat hand.

  “So, Ruthie, whatsa matter? What happened? You look like you seen a ghost or somethin’. Whatsa matter?”

  Ruthie stared up at the friendly face above her, and tried to pull her arm away, twisting against Mrs Cohen’s grip, but she couldn’t.

  “Nothing—nothing, let me go—it’s nothing!”

  Mrs Cohen shook her slightly. “You don’t look like that for nothing, boobalah—so what’s the matter? What is it?”

  And now Ruthie started to cry, the tears all hot on her face, as she twisted against Mrs Cohen’s strong hand.

  “It’s nothing—nothing….” Then above her own tears she heard Esther’s bubbly giggle again, and she looked over her shoulder at the entrance to the alleyway, terrified in case the girls would come out and look at her with their shiny eyes and wet mouths, and she wriggled harder than ever, crying very loudly.

  Mrs Cohen went to the top of the alleyway herself to look down it, pulling Ruthie with her, and peered along into the dimness.

  “Something in Festival Street is it, boobalah?” she said, and then suddenly let go of Ruthie’s arm to run awkwardly up the alleyway towards the girls and the tall man with the flat fair hair.

  Ruthie couldn’t do anything now but stand still and cry, the tears running down her face. There was a noise in the alleyway, Mrs Cohen’s voice very loud and echoing so that you couldn’t hear exactly what she was shouting, the girls suddenly bursting into loud shrieks as though they were crying too. Then there was a clatter as the man ran away, back along the alley to the Festival Street end, and Mrs Cohen came out of the alley pushing the girls in front of her.

  The noise from the alleyway had brought people from along the street hurrying up to see what was the matter, and Ruthie was suddenly in the middle of a lot of women all talking at the tops of their voices, all shouting at Mrs Cohen to tell them what was the matter, while the girls stood in a cluster, all crying very loudly except Rachel, who stood still and lumpish, her mouth hanging open as usual, her head thrust forwards as she stared round blinking at the women.

  “It’s all right, boobalah,” Mrs Cohen was saying to Esther, who was crying loudest of all, rubbing her eyes with her knuckles. “It’s all right—I find your mother. It’s all right …”

  Mrs Salmon came pushing through the little knot of people, her face full of fright, and grabbed at Esther, who immediately threw herself on her broad chest, and clung to her.

  “Mummy, Mummy! It was awful, Mummy—it was awful! He wouldn’t let us go—it was awful—he was dirty, Mummy, he was dirty …”

  “So tell me, Esther baby, tell me—what happened?” Mrs Salmon held on tightly to her Esther, stroking her hair with one hand while she mopped at her eyes with an end of her apron. “Tell Momma then, what happened? Who was dirty? What happened?”

  Esther, gulping and breathing unevenly so that her words came jerkily, looked up at her mother with a pathetic look on her face, and said piteously, “It was a—a man, Mummy, and he—
he—did dirty things …”

  Mrs Salmon looked very frightened and began to shake Esther urgently.

  “He did dirty things to you? A man? Gevult! What did he do, baby—he touched you? What did he do, where did he touch you?”

  Esther dropped her eyes in the way Ruthie had seen her drop them at school when Mrs Ward asked which of the children had broken something, and said very quietly, “He—he didn’t touch us, Mummy—he showed us—he unbuttoned …” She looked at her mother’s face through her eyelashes, and started to cry again. “He showed us! He was dirty, Mummy, he was dirty.”

  The women began to chatter excitedly again, and Ruthie, her own tears drying on her face, stared at Esther and the other girls.

  It’s all wrong, she thought. It wasn’t like that at all. The man was frightened as well, he was. Ruthie remembered the man’s face, half smiling, half not smiling, and she knew he had been frightened, remembered the funny noise he had made in his throat when Rachel had put her hand out, how he had tried to get further back into the wall away from her, and she stared at Esther and her pretty face and shiny eyes, still a bit shiny like they had been in the alleyway, though shiny with crying as well, and she felt very frightened of Esther.

  Esther looked at her for a moment, and Ruthie looked away quickly. She couldn’t look at Esther looking at her, it was too awful to see those shiny eyes fixed on her own.

  Mrs Salmon took Esther away then, her arm round her shoulders while Esther leaned on her mother and sniffed loudly, and Shirley and Sandra went away with their mother as well, both crying, but looking sideways at Esther as they went, and to Ruthie it was almost as though they giggled at each other and pushed each other with their eyes. Mrs Cohen took Rachel into her shop, because her mother wasn’t there—she worked in a workshop some days, and Mrs Cohen kept an eye on Rachel for Mrs Kaye, and Ruthie went back home herself.

  Her mother hadn’t been in the street when the noise in the alleyway started, and Ruthie was very glad. She hadn’t come to see what had happened, so Ruthie didn’t have to explain to her mother about it. How could she have explained about the frightened man standing in the alleyway with his hands in front of him, who had been frightened when Rachel put her hand out towards him? She couldn’t explain, any more than she could explain about the way Esther’s and Sandra’s and Shirley’s eyes had been shiny, and how they had giggled with a bubbly giggle.

  So when she went upstairs, she just asked her mother if she could stay in and play with Leon, because it was too hot to play outside, and her mother said she could. Ruthie was very glad. She was afraid that if she stayed out, Esther and Sandra and Shirley and Rachel would come out again, and Ruthie was very frightened of them. She never wanted to play with them ever, even if they would let her.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  AFTER the day when she sat under Black Sophie’s table and discovered that grown-ups were only big children, not better or cleverer than herself, only older, and the business with the frightened man and the four girls in the alleyway, things changed for Ruthie. She didn’t know how they had changed—just that she was a different Ruthie.

  It wasn’t only that she was bigger than she used to be, that her dresses didn’t reach as far down her legs as they had, that she needed new sandals because her toes hit the bottom of her old ones. It was more than that. She suddenly knew she was Ruthie, that no one else in the whole world was her, that although people, grown-ups and other children, were like her in lots of ways, no one could be Ruthie but Ruthie.

  She would sit on the kerb outside her house, looking at her legs where they came out of her dress, at the faint bluish circles in the skin under the brownness of the tan she had developed from the day-in, day-out, heat of the sun. She would look at her legs, at the skin of her hands, the network of the very tiny lines with golden hairs showing where the lines met each other, and think about being Ruthie.

  “This is me,” she would say softly, enjoying feeling her lips move against her teeth as she mouthed the words. “This will always be me. I’ll get bigger and bigger, and it will always be me. I am Ruthie Lee. Ruthie Lee. I have black hair and brown eyes and I am Ruthie Lee. I have two legs and two eyes and two arms and two thumbs on two hands, and I am Ruthie Lee.”

  She liked the thought of being special like this, being just herself, most of the time.

  Sometimes, though, she would remember the way the four big girls had giggled and looked shiny-eyed and wet-mouthed in the alleyway, and then she didn’t like being Ruthie, because it meant that one day, quite soon, when she was as big as they were, she would be like that. For she knew she would, knew she would get excited inside when people did things like the man in the alleyway had done, would feel bubbly inside as the four girls had done. It was strange how she knew, strange as knowing one day she would be big. But she knew, all right.

  The hot days pleated themselves into weeks, and Ruthie could recognise how long she had been in Aspen Street, how long since she had left the country.

  She still couldn’t remember what had happened in the country, just that she had been there, that she had been a problem child, had run away from the country. She knew because she had been told so, but however hard she tried, she couldn’t see, inside her head, what the country had looked like. She could see the house they used to live in, before the war, she could see that all right. It had had a kitchen and a living room, and she had had her own bedroom, and there had been no Leon, and Daddy had been there, and Mummy had been there, a different Mummy, friendly, talking more than this one did. But she couldn’t see the country at all.

  The old Ruthie, the one who had lived in that house, she had not been able to know about time. There had only been now, and there had been then. But the new Ruthie was cleverer. She knew when yesterday was, what had happened yesterday, when last Tuesday had been, and the things that had happened on Tuesday, and this was rather special. It was part of being bigger, of knowing that tomorrow and next Tuesday and the Tuesday after were real, that they would arrive, and that Ruthie would be growing all the time.

  Up to now, Ruthie hadn’t thought very much about the place she was in. There was home, and when she was there, that was the only place in the world. And there was school, and when she was there, home disappeared and would only come back when Ruthie went there again. Now, she liked to think about where she was. She would draw little pictures of where she was in her red notebook. She would draw Commercial Road, and then draw Aspen Street, with the alleyway at the end, and then Festival Street. Then she would draw a picture of the map of England round the drawings of the streets, with the Government down in Cornwall with the other children. She made a big circle round the streets, and that was London. These drawings were very important to Ruthie, because now she knew where she was.

  She was happy. Even when her mother got angry with her for wetting herself, or in the mornings when her bed was wet, she didn’t care. Inside herself, while she looked at her mother shouting at her, she would feel happy, because she knew all the time that it didn’t matter what her mother said any more, not now Ruthie knew her mother was just a big person called Mrs Lee who got wet herself. This was a secret, of course, that she knew. She wouldn’t have told her mother she knew, not for anything. She could look at her shouting, and think, “It doesn’t matter, because I know and you don’t know I do.” It was wonderful.

  Ruthie would listen to the women talking in the street, during the long hot afternoons, leaning against the doorway behind her mother’s kitchen chair, or in Black Sophie’s kitchen, and listen to them talking. They always talked the same way. About babies, about the bombing, about going to the country, about how hard it was to buy things sometimes, and underneath their talking, Ruthie could feel them all tight and frightened. It was as though they had two voices, Ruthie thought sometimes, the ones they talk with, and the ones they think with, and I can hear the thinking voices though they don’t know.

  She knew what they were frightened of. They were frightened of the bombs,
mostly, of getting killed. This was something Ruthie quite understood—that they were frightened. She was often frightened herself, of things like being caught taking an apple from the stall in Festival Street when the stall keeper was asleep in her chair, of Mrs Ward catching her picking her nose—these things. But she couldn’t really understand why they were frightened of raids, of being bombed and killed, of having their houses broken. The raids were so exciting—not frightening a bit, just exciting. The rumbling and thumping that made the houses shake, the lovely sweep of the searchlights, these were beautiful, and Ruthie couldn’t really see why anyone should be frightened of them. And even if a bomb did break a house, what did it matter? There would be lovely pieces of sparkling broken glass, drifts of white powder everywhere, beds on top of piles of stones. These were lovely things—not frightening ones.

  And then something happened that made Ruthie begin to see, just a little bit, why the women in the street were frightened of the beautiful raids. She discovered that raids weren’t just beautiful, just sweeping searchlights, and shivery feelings in the ground when the thumps and growls came. Raids could make things happen that were frightening.

  It was five o’clock one afternoon. Ruthie was sitting by the table in the kitchen, rolling a piece of plasticine into a pudding, putting the point of her pencil into the warm plasticine to make a pudding with raisins in it, while her mother was getting things ready for Leon’s supper.

  “The milk’s gone off,” Ruthie’s mother said, holding the dripping bottle in her hand, crouching over the bowl of water in the corner where she kept the milk to keep it cool. “It’s gone off …”

  “Will you make cream cheese?” Ruthie said, pleased. She liked that, when the sour milk was put in a little muslin bag, and hung over the sink from the tap, dripping softly. She could touch the plump bag, and extra water would drip out, and the place where her finger touched sprang back all smooth as soon as she took her finger away. “Will you make cream cheese?”