War Babies

by Annie Murray

  Rachel looked at her sitting at the table, sickly little Lilian of their schooldays, who was now tall and rather pretty in a pale way, with her blonde hair cut to her shoulders, pinned back in the fashionable style and turned under at the ends. She seemed confident, full of life and ready for anything.

  ‘Crikey, Lil – what does your mom say?’

  Lilian laughed. ‘She thinks I’ve gone off my head. But that’s war work for you. And I was bored . . . She doesn’t really mind so long as I come home as often as I can. There’s lots of girls working up there now.’

  As Lilian left later, still full of it, Rachel said, ‘Good luck – and keep me posted, won’t you? Don’t forget us.’ But as she said goodbye, she knew she wouldn’t be seeing much of her friend. She could already feel Lilian moving away from her into a quite different life. Here she was, married and – for a moment she had a pang – stuck here.

  The person she did see now, though, was Netta Fitzpatrick. They had run into each other several times in the neighbourhood and over the months they had struck up a friendship. In a way Rachel could not understand why Netta wanted to see her. Netta’s husband was able to come home on leave now and then from the Pay Corps and she had conceived and miscarried a second baby since they first met. Though it was much earlier on this time, at three months of the pregnancy, it was still very upsetting for her. Rachel thought the sight of Melanie must make her feel sad and jealous. But Netta was a sweet girl and it became a habit of hers to pop round after work sometimes or at the weekend. Rachel had met her mother, a little birdlike Irish lady called Mrs O’Shaughnessy, who had been very welcoming when she went to their house.

  ‘Are they Catholics?’ Gladys asked suspiciously when she first heard about Mrs O’Shaughnessy. Catholics to her were a foreign lot – the Italian mission to the Irish.

  ‘Yes, they are,’ Rachel said. ‘But they’re ever so nice, Auntie.’

  It had been odd at first, seeing Mary O’Shaughnessy’s sacred hearts and the crucifix and little glass stoop of holy water she kept nailed up by the door. It felt like walking into a foreign land, even though the house was on a yard not far away and almost identical to the one she lived in herself. After a while, though, she realized that these things were so taken for granted by the family – Netta and her mother and brothers – that she took no more notice of them either. Mrs O’Shaughnessy was always very kind and welcoming towards her.

  With Melanie to keep her occupied, with new friends and the support of the yard’s neighbours, Rachel was contented enough, even though they were living through some of the darkest, most desperate days of the war, when everything seemed stacked against them and victory impossible.

  The raids had petered out the summer before, when Germany turned its attention to the invasion of Russia in June 1941. But since then there had been little in the way of good news. Convoys crossing the Atlantic with food supplies from North America were sunk in horrifying numbers. All across the western desert, across the east, since the Japanese entered the war in December, the news came of defeats, one after another.

  Once the bombing stopped, from Rachel’s point of view, caught up as she was with her first baby, the war seemed mostly a faraway business. Apart from the blackout and rationing and all these day-to-day struggles, little of it touched her personally. Even in their yard only two people had gone into the forces. There was Stanley Gittins, Lil’s husband, a tall, dark man Rachel had seen when he came home on leave from the RAF. And Edwin Jackman had gone into the army. Ma Jackman made frequent noises about how her family were the ones doing their bit.

  ‘As if none of the rest of us are,’ Dolly said to Gladys in annoyance after suffering another of these self-righteous remarks. ‘I hardly see Mo these days what with work and the Home Guard. He’s so tired he can hardly stand up. He’s too old to join up anyway.’

  ‘Oh, just ignore her,’ Gladys said. ‘You know what she’s like.’

  ‘I do,’ Dolly fumed. ‘But I don’t have to like it, do I?’

  Rachel basked in the attention she and Melanie received. With Dolly having produced so many boys it was a long time since a little girl had been born in the yard. And she loved living with Danny and Gladys. Once Melanie was a couple of months old she had started taking her to the Rag Market, at least for a bit of the day, to get out and have a change. She propped the little girl on a cushion at the side of Gladys’s pitch where she alternated between sleeping and receiving a lot of attention.

  ‘That’s our little mascot,’ Gladys would say proudly. ‘Growing up in the trade, she is.’

  Peggy had deigned to see Rachel and her granddaughter and they went over there about once a fortnight, to sit and drink tea stiffly together. Rachel always went in the weekdays, when Danny was at work and Fred Horton was in the shop. She didn’t particularly want to see him. He wasn’t interested in her nor she in him.

  Cissy, who was now a very energetic two-and-a-half-year-old, was besotted with Melanie.

  ‘Well, she is a healthy-looking child,’ Peggy had to admit. ‘And she’ll be a bit of company for Cissy. You can bring her over and let them get to know one another. I find it hard going keeping her occupied.’

  ‘As long as it suits you, Mother,’ Rachel said, in just a neutral enough tone for her sarcasm not to be fully evident.

  Beyond that, Peggy was no help at all, neither financially nor in any other way. So far as she was concerned, Rachel had made her bed and now she had to lie on it.

  Danny seemed to thrive on having everyone dear to him under one roof as well and they had a harmonious few months playing – sometimes it felt like that – at being husband and wife. But then they were not playing, because they were actually married! Sometimes Rachel sat up in bed with Melanie in her arms and Danny’s long body lolling beside her and said in wonder:

  ‘I still can’t believe it, Danny – you’re my husband!’

  ‘Well,’ he’d say, with mock pompousness, ‘wife – you’d better get used to the idea, hadn’t you?’

  The Sunday morning after Gladys’s near miss with the van, they were sitting up in bed together, Melanie lying across their laps. Rachel leaned against Danny, close and warm. She kissed his cheek. ‘I’m so happy being with you.’

  Danny reached for her hand. ‘You’re my missis, you are. You’re everything to me. I don’t half love you, Rach. I dunno how to say it really.’

  She squeezed his hand. ‘You said it.’ She reached up and kissed him, then giggled. ‘You’ve still got freckles – loads of them!’

  ‘Have I?’ Danny smiled back lazily, and rubbed his nose. He loved her paying him close attention.

  Rachel looked down at Melanie who was snoozing, warm and content. ‘I wonder if she’ll have them too? Oh, look at her – she’s the best ever. How many kids shall we have, Danny?’

  He prodded her ribs so that she squirmed. ‘I thought you said you were never doing that again?’

  Rachel laughed. ‘I’m getting like Dolly.’ She leaned over and kissed his neck. ‘I might just think about it. It’d be a shame for her not to have anyone to play with, wouldn’t it? So how many?’

  ‘Don’t they just sort of come?’ Danny said, bemused. ‘I mean, you can’t say really, can you? Four? Six?’

  ‘Six! I’ll be an old matron with my belly dragging on the ground if I have six!’

  ‘Tell yer what – let’s make another one now . . .’ He made as if to grab hold of her, half-joking.

  ‘Danny, no! What’re you playing at – and you’ll wake her up! You’re crazy, you are. I didn’t mean now! I’m not having another one for ages yet – not ’til the war’s over anyhow. Danny –’

  ‘Umm?’ He was stroking her shoulder, his nose nuzzling her cheek.

  ‘One day I s’pose we’ll have our own place to live – we can’t always stay with Auntie.’

  At the time this felt frightening. They were both so young, like two lost waifs together, clinging to a rock – and Gladys was that rock on which they res
ted and depended.

  ‘One day,’ he said. ‘But she likes having us here.’

  Rachel lay back, warm and contented. She had never expected to be married with a baby at her age, but just at that moment she would not have swapped it for anything else.

  That February day, the news came through on the wireless that Singapore had fallen to invading Japanese forces. The mood everywhere was sombre. Everyone was finding it hard to take in the speed with which the Japanese were moving across island after island. The horrors of the war seemed to be bleeding right across the globe and there was nothing any of them could do about it.

  A few days later, a letter arrived which cut right through all Rachel’s sense of happiness and safety.

  They hardly ever received letters. When it came, that morning, Gladys was folding clothes at the table, getting ready for the Rag Market. She held the official-looking envelope out in front of her, squinting to see who it was for.

  ‘Oh dear.’ Her voice struck a chill in Rachel, who had Melanie on her lap and was spooning milky slops into her.

  ‘What, Auntie?’

  Gladys turned slowly, as if dreading to look at her. ‘It’s for Danny.’

  Rachel frowned. ‘Danny?’ She realized later that they had never talked about this. Both of them had put it out of their minds as a possibility, or at least she had. Danny had turned eighteen the previous month.

  Gladys brought it over and put it on the table. Rachel could just see Danny’s name in typed letters.

  ‘I can’t open it – it’s not for me,’ said Gladys. ‘But I’d say it’s his call-up papers.’

  ‘No!’ Rachel cried. ‘No, it can’t be!’ She was so alarmed and stiff suddenly that Melanie started to cry. She could not take in what this meant, not at all. ‘They can’t call him up, can they – not Danny?’

  ‘Why not?’ Gladys said. ‘He’s no different from anyone else, is he? And he’s the right age.’

  ‘Oh, they can’t make him go!’ she wailed over the baby’s cries. ‘There must be some way he can stay!’ She stood up, Melanie in her arms, trying to quieten the little girl as her own tears began to flow. It felt like an utter calamity, as if her world, her security, was suddenly shattered in pieces. ‘Oh, I hate this war – it ruins everything for everybody!’

  Twenty-Five

  March 1942

  ‘Oh – I dain’t realize you were in here, bab,’ Dolly said, bursting into the brew house with an armful of washing as Rachel stood at the sink. She seemed wound up and annoyed.

  ‘I’ve nearly finished,’ Rachel said hurriedly. ‘I know it’s your turn today, Mrs Morrison – I just started early to get a few things done.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ Dolly said, appeased. ‘It never ends when you’ve got a babby, does it?’ She put her bundle down and looked more closely at Rachel, who was feeding clothes through the mangle. ‘Here – I’ll give you a hand with those, get it done sooner. Eh – are you all right, Rach?’

  ‘Yes.’ But Rachel’s voice cracked and she kept her head down, trying to hide the tears which came as soon as Dolly showed sympathy.

  ‘Oh dear – you’ll be missing your Danny. It’s a rotten shame, that it is, you poor thing. My old man’s too long in the tooth, but if he had to go I’d be in pieces too.’

  Danny had gone to begin his basic army training two weeks ago. The days before he left were terrible – the dread of him leaving almost worse than when he actually went.

  ‘You told them to call you up . . . You’ve always wanted to go . . . You’ve done this on purpose!’ she raged at him when he came home that night and opened the letter. She was beyond reason in her panic at the thought of him leaving, sobbing with hurt and fury.

  ‘I never!’ Danny protested. He looked very shocked as well.

  ‘You just want to go off and see the world – that’s what you said!’

  ‘No, I don’t!’ Danny interrupted. ‘That was then – everything’s different now. I never asked them to call me up.’

  ‘I don’t believe you. I bet you did! You want to go and leave me and Melly behind.’ Rachel sank down at the table, head on her arms, and sobbed until Gladys intervened.

  ‘Wench,’ she said, standing over her. ‘Pull yerself together. You’re not being fair on the lad. Danny’s eighteen now – they’ve called him like all the others.’ Her voice wavered and Rachel quietened and looked up, startled. Only then, amid her self-absorbed unhappiness, did it occur to her that anyone else might be upset about Danny having to take the King’s shilling.

  Danny stood with his jacket hanging open, looking suddenly scared and somehow smaller.

  ‘Oh, Danny.’ Rachel got up and walked into his arms. ‘I don’t want you to go. What about Melly? I’ll have to bring her up without her daddy.’

  ‘Many a woman’s had to,’ Gladys said quietly. ‘You won’t be the first.’

  Rachel sobbed even harder then, but she knew from that moment that she was going to have to accept it.

  She stayed awake with him all the night before he left, holding him, crying intermittently and talking, clinging to his strong, slender body, trying to memorize every part of him. In the morning, the rest of the yard waved him goodbye.

  ‘You send those Jerries packing, Danny boy!’ Dolly said, hugging him. ‘And you behave yourself while you’re at it.’

  ‘Look after yerself, lad,’ Mo boomed. He sounded emotional. ‘No more than a babby himself,’ he muttered.

  ‘Oh my – look,’ Dolly said to the little crowd in a hushed tone. They turned to see old Mr Parsons standing creakily to attention at his front door, his old khaki Boer War uniform jacket buttoned over his scrawny frame. Silently, he gave a slow salute. Danny nodded solemnly at him. ‘Ta, Mr Parsons,’ he called.

  ‘Bless the old feller’s heart,’ Dolly said, sounding tearful.

  Gladys was holding Melanie who waved her little arm but did not know what was happening.

  ‘Goodbye, m’lad,’ Gladys said gruffly. ‘Get yourself back here as soon as you can.’ She pulled Danny roughly against her for a moment with her spare arm, before pushing him away again. Head down, she carried Melanie into the house.

  Rachel caught hold of Danny’s arm, determined not to be separated from him until the very last moment. He turned, with her on one arm, his bag on the other shoulder, and gave a wave before they set off along the entry. But as they travelled from Aston on the tram, Danny suddenly seemed cold and shut off from her, just when she needed him to be warm and close. He sat staring out of the window as if he was already miles away. By the time they got to New Street and found the right platform, he had still not said a word and she was welling up.

  ‘Danny!’ She pulled his arm in the milling crowd of uniforms and civilian clothes all jostling together. ‘Don’t be like this. We might never see each other again!’ And she was in a storm of tears.

  Danny, looking wretched, pulled her to him and they held each other tightly, as if there was no one else in the world.

  ‘I love you,’ she said passionately. ‘I’ll always love you.’

  Danny held her even tighter. ‘I love you too,’ he whispered. She saw then that he could not speak because he was afraid he might cry. ‘Gotta go,’ he said. ‘Look after our little Melly.’ And he pulled away, out of her grasp, as if he could bear it no longer.

  Rachel would never forget the sight of his sad face looking through the train window, the trail of smoke and steam obscuring it as the engine got up speed and pulled away. He gave a last wave, then withdrew inside. She felt as if she was being torn in half. She walked back to the tram stop after leaving the station, the sounds of the city coming back to her now that she was not wrapped up in him. She felt desperately alone and empty.

  Ever since, she had ached for him, a feeling like a heavy weight in her chest. She had been miles away, doing her washing, until Dolly appeared.

  ‘Terrible, all these young’uns going off,’ Dolly was saying, stoking the fire under the copper for her wash
ing water. ‘But then they need age on their side. I said to Mo the other night, “Eh, husband of mine, why don’t we go out – have a bit of a dance? We ain’t been out to the dance hall for ages!” And he sat there in his chair and said, “Dance? I can hardly get myself up the stairs to bed these days, let alone flaming dance!”’ She turned, grinning. ‘That’s my old man for you – no good sending him off to war!’

  Rachel couldn’t help laughing, and pegged out Melly’s clothes in the chill wind of the yard, feeling a bit cheered up.

  Life now consisted of looking after her daughter and sitting in with Gladys night after night. Gladys, as ever, had busy hands, sewing and mending clothes she had acquired to sell, ironing and folding, and Rachel helped as much as she could. But she could not hide her misery at missing Danny. Gladys, she realized, had long worked out her own collection of comforts – her sweets, her trips to the cinema and her religion. She sang hymns to cheer herself up, but it didn’t work for Rachel, who had scarcely ever been to church anyway.

  ‘You ought to come out with me,’ Gladys suggested. ‘When I’m buying stuff. It’d get you out of yourself.’

  ‘Well, I can’t get that thing on the bus.’ She nodded at the pram. ‘I could come with her and carry her, I suppose . . .’

  ‘Hmm.’ Gladys pondered a moment, hands on hips. ‘It’d be good to have the pram – we can put stuff in it. It’s hardly worth going anywhere walking distance.’ ‘Most of the areas within reach were as poor as their own. ‘’Cept Erdington maybe . . .’ Her face lit up. ‘I know – we can’t get it on the bus but we might get it on the train. How about we go out to Sutton and do the rounds a bit – and we could call in on Nancy and Albert and see the girls?’

  The train chugged out from Aston between the miles of soot-stained factories and lines of cramped houses, all covered in a pall of smoke, even on this quiet day. Gladys had hurried back from church and off they went to the railway station. Rachel found she was excited to be on a journey. North of Erdington everything started to open out and become more spacious and green. Rachel sat with Melly on her lap, looking out through the grimy window at the bigger houses with gardens, most with their curved, corrugated-steel Anderson shelters and the rows of allotments, some with people in them bent over, digging. It quickly began to feel like another world.