by Annie Murray
As she walked amid all the other people hurrying to factories and shops, a voice called to her.
‘Evie! Wait for me!’
Evie turned to see Carol Rough, one of her workmates from the factory, running to catch her up, her curly brown hair bouncing as she ran, breath clouding on the air.
She smiled. Carol was a pale, sweet-faced, slender girl with dreamy blue eyes. She had come to work at Coopers Mackie factory shortly before Evie. The factory was one of the hundreds of metal bashing firms housed in filthy old Victorian buildings round the centre of Birmingham. This one was on the first floor of a building, up a narrow staircase, its grimy windows looking out onto a side street just off Digbeth, not far from the great blue-brick railways arches which spanned the area. When Evie first arrived, Carol had been asked to ‘show her the ropes’.
‘Ropes ain’t going to be much use to you in here,’ she’d said, winking as the gaffer of their workroom turned away. She led Evie over to the row of machines for turning the tips of the steel needles. ‘Your hands’ll get sore, I’m warning yer – them shavings can cut your fingers to ribbons if you’re not careful.’
There were eight girls working in a row on a bench along the windows, in mucky overalls, feeding the steel rods of varying sizes upright into the machine. This spun the rods round, with oil running down them, so that the bottom end was sharpened to a point. The metal shavings were caught underneath and Evie found Carol was right. When you went to transfer them into the waste box, they were rough and sharp and she had cut her fingers many a time on them.
‘Oh yeah, you have to watch that.’ Carol smirked at her that first day as the oil in the machine suddenly sprayed out all over Evie, even getting her in the face.
‘Ergh!’ Evie jumped back, cursing. ‘Sodding thing! Well, thanks for telling me! All this for some flaming knitting needles.’
‘Oh, they use them for other things,’ one of the girls said.
‘Well, what?’ Evie asked crossly, wiping herself down with a rag as the other machines still banged and whirred away.
The girl shrugged, laughing. ‘I dunno. Who cares? It’s a bit better than stamping, that’s all I know.’
The girls put them back in boxes and they went off elsewhere for coating and to have ends put on them.
They were a rough and ready crew, standing all day on the dusty old floorboards. By the end of each day Evie’s feet ached, her hands were often cut to ribbons, she stank of oil and her neck was stiff. But she had become good friends with Carol and a couple of the other girls in the factory over the past year, working side by side, meeting up in coffee bars after work or going to the pictures. Carol had been the best thing about this miserable year. She still lived with her parents, not far away in Balsall Heath, and sometimes invited Evie home. Mrs Rough, her mom, was a kindly, welcoming lady and Carol, the baby of her family, had two brothers.
‘Happy New Year! D’you have a nice Christmas?’ Carol asked, panting as she caught up.
‘Oh yeah, ta,’ Evie lied. ‘You know – just quiet, like, back at home.’
Though Carol was now her best friend, Evie had never been entirely straight with her. She had told Carol that her family had moved back to Manchester because that was where her dad was originally from and his mother was old and needed him. Though she had gone with them, she had missed Birmingham and the wages were better here (she had no idea if this was true but it sounded like a good reason) and wanted to come back. She had two sisters, both married with children up there. This, at least, was partly the case, though she painted her sisters as the sort of family she would have wanted to have – nice and a bit of a laugh, the way Carol’s seemed to be. Of the real truth about where she was from, she said nothing. About what had happened and her aching heart. About Julie.
Here was a new place where no one need know anything much about her. She was determined to wipe clean the whole experience of her life and begin again. The only person she felt badly about was Gary. Poor Gary. The last time she saw him he was in such a state. She couldn’t help feeling she had let him down by vanishing. But she had had her own pain, her own suffering. What else, in reality, could she have done for Gary?
‘God, it’s cold,’ Carol complained, blowing on her green woolly-mittened hands. ‘They say it’s going to snow tonight.’ She peered up at the clear sky. ‘Don’t look like it at the moment, does it? Anyhow, our mom says d’you want to come over for tea at the weekend? We’re already sick of the sight of her Christmas cake!’
Evie laughed. ‘Wants me to come and eat it up for her, does she?’
‘She likes you.’ Carol looked soberly at her. ‘And now our Maureen’s got married she misses having more girls in the house.’
Evie felt a lift of happiness at this. Her Christmas had been so solitary and sad and now someone wanted her. However lonely she often felt, at least Carol was friendly to her.
‘Course I’ll come,’ she said. ‘It’s nice of her.’
She had not spent Christmas completely on her own, because Mrs Hardy, her landlady, a widow, was alone herself. She had one grown-up son, Len, who had emigrated to New Zealand with his wife. Len was her main topic of conversation – about how proud she was of him, his grammar school achievements, the good jobs he had been given – and how betrayed she felt at his departure. The other lodger in the tall, spacious terrace was a morose secretary called Barbara who had taken herself off back to her parents in Astwood Bank over the holiday.
Mrs Hardy was a plump, homely lady in her fifties, with faded blonde hair swept back into a pleat and blue eyes. As well as needing the rent money, she was rather a nervous person and did not like to be alone in the house at night. She had been very glad Evie was staying for Christmas and plied her with food and sherry. Evie in turn felt looked after, even though she said very little to Mrs Hardy about herself.
Mrs Hardy had been a stroke of luck. The day she left the mother and baby home, Evie had boarded a bus in Moseley hardly knowing or caring where she was going. After a few stops, on impulse, she got off again in Balsall Heath and wandered the streets for quite a time. In Sparkhill, she saw a sign in the window of a house. It was not the first sign she saw saying ‘Room to Let’ – some added ‘No Blacks’ or ‘No Children’ or both – but it was the first that seemed to beckon her. She liked the look of the house and of Mrs Hardy, whose husband had gone to the Far East during the war, leaving her with Len, a young lad at school. He never returned.
Her room was at the back, looking over a long strip of garden edged by roses and flowering trees – lilac and laburnum, bright mauve and yellow in spring. The room was plain, with brown linoleum covering the floor and brown and yellow striped curtains. Other than the bed, there was a chest of drawers, a small wardrobe and a table and chair by the window.
That day, when Evie arrived, she looked into the room and knew it was a place she could be. It was well away from Ladywood and it felt safe and comfortable. She put the cloth bag down on the chair and reached into it for the little white booties she had taken from the home: the wool which had lain softly against her little girl’s feet only a few days before. All of it, the experience of having Julie, her arrival in the world, holding her and feeding her, still felt so close to her. And her baby’s face was clear in her mind. Not having her near was like having her skin torn away. There was a pain of grief and longing in her all the time and she felt she would never be complete again without the warm weight of a child in her arms.
She lay on the bed, head on the pillow, and held the little booties against her face, breathing in their scent.
‘Julie,’ she whispered, her body aching with loss. ‘Julie, Julie.’
The rent was ten shillings. She gave Mrs Hardy an advance on it out of Ken’s money and with a few pennies more she bought a pad of good-quality Basil Bond writing paper and envelopes, as well as a pencil, rubber and sharpener.
At that time her body was still producing milk. Every so often, especially if she thought of Julie, the
re would be that almost painful tingle at the sides of her breasts and the milk would come down. She was horrified at the way it wet her clothes and at the thought that people would notice and she bought a length of muslin and some cotton wool and made pads to line her bra. At night she still sometimes woke bathed in sweat and all of it was a reminder of what her body had been used for, what it should still be doing for her little girl. Every night she lay in bed sobbing, her breasts wet and aching, cuddling the pillow, or her rolled-up cardigan – anything to feel that her arms were not empty.
She had no photograph of Julie, no picture to remember her by except that in her mind. During those days, as well as finding herself the job at Coopers Mackie and getting used to Mrs Hardy and her rules about meals and noise and hot water, she sat with her notebook at the little table by the window in her room.
She tried to sketch Julie as she remembered her, tearing the drawing up, sometimes weeping in frustration. One Saturday, bright and alive with the feel of spring outside in the garden, she ripped up yet another sheet of paper.
‘I can’t draw – I’m hopeless,’ she said, distraught. Scraps of paper were scattered on the bed. She would put them on the fire downstairs. These were something she did not want Mrs Hardy, or anyone else, to see.
She rested her chin on her hands and stared out at the row of houses behind. A ramshackle hen coop in one of the gardens added another pang to her already aching heart, reminding her of Mr and Mrs Waring: two more people who had shown her that kindness was possible. Memories of home flooded back to her. She had tried not to think of any of it since she left. Her mother’s words, her bullying hatred. I’m never ever going back there, she had said to herself over and over.
She stared down at another sheet of blue paper, willing Julie’s face to appear on it by the force of her longing. Again, she tried with her pencil – the curve of a cheek, her little nose, closed eyes, loving every line, trying to will her back into flesh. For once something seemed to go right. She drew only her baby’s head, with a soft line at the neck suggesting her clothing. It was working! Hardly daring to do more in case she spoilt it, she shaded in a tiny fuzz of eyelashes, a hint of hair, the faint outline of an ear . . .
Yes. It was her. It was what she remembered. She wrote ‘Julie, my beloved daughter’ in the corner. This sheet of paper now felt like her most precious possession.
‘I’ll never forget you,’ she whispered, stroking the paper cheek with her finger. ‘Whatever they call you and wherever you are, you’ll always be my little girl. I’ll think of you every day and you’ll be forever in my heart.’ An ache began in her throat, and more tears washed her face. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t be better for you. I’m so sorry.’
In one of the envelopes she had already, with bitter feelings, put the rest of the money from Ken. Yet it was also a cushion of safety for when she needed things. Why shouldn’t she have some nice things? He was getting on with his life all right no doubt.
Into another envelope, she slid the folded picture of Julie. She did not seal it. She wanted to look at it again and again. She tucked it right at the back of her top drawer, under the few underclothes. After closing the drawer she stood holding the handle, not wanting to let go.
Twenty-Eight
At first she thought about Julie almost every moment of the day, sick with the pain of separation. She did her best to put on a normal face to the world and hide her misery, but she felt she would never be able to forgive herself or smile again without having to force her face against its will. She kept getting out her little drawing from its hiding place and gazing at it, stroking it until the lines were blurred and she had to go over them again.
As the weeks passed, her milk dried up and the reality of Julie’s physical presence receded, and she began to find that there were times in the day when she was not thinking about her. The memory of her baby would suddenly jar back into her mind, flooding her with guilt. How could she not be thinking of Julie? How could she think of something else? She became afraid that she would forget. But she was aware that already she no longer knew exactly what Julie looked like. Julie was gone, and she had to believe that it was to a better home than she could ever have given her.
All through that year, she had tried to live quietly. She had made friends with Carol and some of the other girls in the factory and listened to Mrs Hardy’s reminiscences. Mrs Hardy was pleasant and was company of a sort. Evie was grateful to her. In the evening they often sat in the back room with its table covered by an embroidered cloth, armchairs by the fire, the mantel displaying her wedding portrait, the sepia smiles of a younger Mrs Hardy and ‘Arthur’, solemn-faced with a neat moustache, and the photograph of Len at about sixteen, fair-haired and smiling. Mrs Hardy rarely asked her lodger anything about herself, which suited Evie very well. And being someone who could listen made her feel needed.
‘It’s very nice having you here, Eve,’ Mrs Hardy would say sometimes, surfacing from her own preoccupations. ‘That other girl’ – she nodded her head upwards towards Barbara’s room – ‘doesn’t seem to like company.’ At Christmas she had shaken her head and said, ‘You’re such a pretty little thing. I don’t know what you’re doing sitting here with an old lady like me.’
‘I like a nice quiet life,’ Evie told her. ‘I’m a bit of a home bird really.’
But as time passed, she was not always sitting in with Mrs Hardy. At first she did. But she became more and more restless, driven by a hunger inside her. And by her own anguished thoughts. She could not stand sitting in her room for long. Some evenings she went out with Carol and the other girls. But other times, she found herself buttoning up her coat, stepping out of the house and, at first, just wandering about.
Sometimes, at weekends, she walked for hours. Balsall Heath and Sparkhill felt quite like Ladywood, which was both a comfort but also a source of pain and regret. There were the jagged wastes of bombsites filled with weeds and rubble and puddles, the rough open spaces of rubbish and dumped old cars busy with dogs and kids, soon filthy however much their moms sent them out in clean clothes. There was the wasteland where tinkers had moved in to camp, which Evie skirted round; there were the new tower blocks going up, stark and sharp-edged against the sky.
She walked streets of tightly packed terraces, some of them backing onto yards, just like the ones she had been brought up in. Doors stood open, children milling in and out. Some, however poor, were neat and scrubbed clean, from the front step to the proudly mended furniture and fresh curtains. Others, she could tell from a glimpse or a whiff of staleness and neglect, were like the houses she had been reared in – unkempt, shabby, crammed full of people, with dodgy plumbing and even dodgier electrics. Some housed families who either couldn’t, or wouldn’t, cope with so many kids and all the burdens of life.
The smells coming from doorways of this neighbourhood were now full of a mixture of people who had lived there all their lives and incomers from Ireland, Pakistan, the West Indies . . . There was the musty stink of the old houses themselves, mingled with cigarette smoke and scouring powders, coconut and scented hair oil, curry spice, urine, chimney smoke, drains . . . Houses teemed with children of varying colours in clothes of varying colours, spilling into the streets in knots: wrangling, chanting, laughing, sweet-sucking, squabbling, energetic kids.
One afternoon she was walking along a street in Balsall Heath when she saw, perched on the front doorstep, a little girl of about five years old, with waxy white skin and fair hair tumbling over her shoulders. Her elbows rested on her knees, hands cupping her cheeks. She seemed lost in a dream world while the other children played along the street.
They’ve shut her out, Evie thought, with a sharp twist of memory. She felt again the coldness of the step against her own backside, her own sense of abandonment. As she drew closer, the little girl sat up, lowering her hands as she saw Evie watching her.
‘’Ello, lady,’ she said.
She seemed happy enough, Evie thought as she said hello ba
ck. She looked a perky little soul with a trusting smile on her face. Is that what Julie would look like, in a few years’ time? As Evie walked level with the door, she saw that it was open and a plump, pink-faced woman in an apron was sitting on a chair just inside, a cigarette jutting from her lips, hands busy in a white bowl in her lap. She looked up, hearing her daughter say something.
‘All right, bab?’ she called out, removing the cigarette. ‘Who’re you looking for?’
Evie was filled with longing to be taken in by this kind lady, to be sat down, given tea and motherly advice. But she could not pretend.
‘No one, ta,’ she said. ‘Just passing.’
She went to the next corner shop for cigarettes – she smoked off and on. She had been using Ken’s money to buy treats in an angry, why-the-hell-not sort of way. She bought a bar of Dairy Milk for comfort, sucking each sweet, melting square to make it last.
Sometimes in the evenings, when the gnawing inside her took over, she would creep downstairs and along the dark hall, not wanting Mrs Hardy to notice her slipping out. If Mrs Hardy ever said anything, she’d make an excuse. ‘I’m just popping out for a smoke,’ at which Mrs Hardy would reply, ‘Why don’t you go out to the back, dear? You don’t need to stand in the street like that.’ Usually she escaped without her noticing. She felt bad doing it, but she could not help herself.
