by Annie Murray
Edna meant well. She was cheerful, energetic and fiercely house-proud, forever scrubbing at something and always convinced she knew best.
‘Oh, I don’t think you ought to be feeding him again yet, ought you?’ she’d say when Robbie was a baby. ‘You don’t want to spoil him.’
‘You don’t want’ was one of Edna’s phrases. ‘You don’t want to put that on there,’ when Em put a little vase of flowers in her own and Norm’s bedroom. ‘It’ll make a stain.’ ‘You don’t want to put him in that – it’s still damp . . .’ Or ‘You want to make sure you turn that mattress . . .’ Em was sick to the back teeth of being told what she did and didn’t want. She knew really that her in-laws were far better than many, but she longed to live in her own house, where she could decide what she wanted for herself. Where her married life could start properly, instead of being stuck with Norm’s parents.
After a quick dinner of bread with pickled beetroot and a wafer of cheese, Em was still in a bad mood.
‘Come on, Robbie,’ she sighed. ‘We’ll go and see Nanna and Granddad.’
‘Oh!’ he protested, grimacing. ‘I wanna go and play out with Don and Eric!’
‘Well, you’re not going with them today,’ Em said firmly. She didn’t like the way Robbie was hanging about with a lot of the older boys these days. He was mad to be with them, scouring the bomb pecks for shrapnel and other treasures, playing games of shooting Germans.
As they walked along in the muggy afternoon, Em glanced a few times at her son’s shorn head. She wasn’t sure she liked the haircut. It was very short and made him look too grown-up, and somehow harder in the face.
‘Your hair’ll grow back soon,’ she said, rubbing a hand over it. Robbie shrugged her off impatiently.
He was in a world of his own, pulling on her hand, trying to get her to walk faster and muttering to himself. He was in some war game now as well, she could tell. Suddenly he caught sight of a skinny, red-haired boy across the street.
‘Eh – Tommy!’ he yelled.
‘All right, Robbie!’ the lad, about ten, bawled back.
‘Shoosh, Robbie,’ Em scolded. ‘Don’t shout across the road like that. It’s rude.’
Robbie shrugged. He was starting to walk with a swagger, she saw with a pang. He wasn’t like her little boy any more, soft and biddable. These days he was off out, the first chance he got, and came home filthy with cuts and grazes on his legs, full of the big boys and all their adventures. It had hit her hard when he first went to school, even though it was to Cromwell Street where she had been herself. She sometimes felt he’d outgrown her, even though he was only six – that she was a bore who spoiled his fun. It was only at night when he was half asleep, or if he was poorly, that he felt like her sweet little boy again, the boy who needed her comfort.
Here I am, she thought resentfully, with the two of them, husband and son – and neither of them take the blindest bit of notice of me. Norm had taken a while to settle back to life at home after the army. Over these past years his restlessness had died down a bit, but he was not the man who had gone away, devoted to her and wanting nothing but to be with her. He was off and out with the lads far more. Sometimes she looked back with nostalgia to the days of the war, when she had missed him and longed wholeheartedly for him to come home. Now he was here, everything felt so flat. She found herself longing for a daughter who might give her more company.
As they crossed the cut, Em pulled Robbie to a stop and looked down into the water.
‘I can’t see, Mom,’ Robbie said, jumping at the wall and scuffing his shoes. He held up his arms, little again suddenly. ‘Lift us up.’
With an effort she hoisted him up in time to see a filthy joey boat containing coal slide out of sight under the bridge.
‘There – gone,’ she said, and kissed the soft skin at the back of Robbie’s neck.
‘Mom, don’t!’ he cried, wriggling. ‘That’s sissy, that is! Put me down!’
As she bent to let him down to the ground Em felt tears start in her eyes. Here she was, twenty-five years old and she felt like an old matron, stuck in her ways. There was nothing to look forward to. And she knew deep down that her resentment and anger towards Norm stemmed from the fact that she had still not caught for another baby. And so far as she was concerned, it was all his fault.
‘D’you fancy going up the park?’ Cynthia said when she arrived. ‘It’s quite a nice day – I’d like a bit of a breather.’
‘All right,’ Em said listlessly. She knew it was a good idea, but she could really have done with a sit down.
‘Just give me a minute.’ Cynthia said. ‘Come on, Robbie, you can come up with me while I change my shoes.
Bob was in the back room, and Violet was sitting at the table, peering at the newspaper. She looked up, squinting at Em.
‘Oh, hello,’ she said smiling.
Bob, who had been snoozing, opened his eyes long enough to say, ‘All right, wench?’ and slid back into sleep again, snoring gently. Even though she saw him nearly every day, Em was aware that her father was ageing fast.
‘You coming up the park with us, Vi?’ Em asked, hoping she would. Violet was good with Robbie and took some of the pressure off her.
‘Can’t – I’m going out with Sue and Peggy.’
‘Oh.’ Em was disappointed. But she knew there must be more exciting ways for her seventeen-year-old sister to spend the afternoon. ‘Anywhere nice?’
Violet shrugged. ‘Dunno really – we might go into town.’
‘Vi, you’ve nearly got your nose on that newspaper . . .’
Violet straightened her back for a moment, then sunk down again. ‘I can’t see unless I sit close.’
‘Well, that’s no good, is it? You need glasses. You can get them free now, you know that, don’t you?’
Violet looked round. ‘Can I?’
‘So they say. Norm’s mom’s talking about getting glasses.’ Edna was full of the new National Health Service. Some of her friends were going to see a doctor for the first time in years, after suffering in silence. ‘You ought to go and see.’
Cynthia came back down again. ‘Come on then,’ she said. ‘There’s a chance Dot might come an’ all. We can meet her up there.’
‘All right,’ Em said. She was fond of Dot, her mom’s old friend, but the thought of going all the way to Aston Park to listen to the two of them canting didn’t fill her with enthusiasm. Still, she had to get through the day somehow.
Thank goodness for my little job, she thought. She was still working Tuesday, Thursday and half of Friday and Saturday with Mr Perry. It got her out of the house. Otherwise, she thought, I’d be going off my head by now.
Norm scraped into the house just in time for tea, having been down the pub after the football. Em thought sourly that he could always manage to be in time for his mother, if nothing else.
Edna had made a fish pie and the room stank of fish, but it tasted quite good, padded out with a lot of potato and carrot.
‘Nanna,’ Robbie said in the middle of tea. ‘Can we get a dog?’
‘Don’t talk with your mouth full,’ Edna corrected him.
‘A dog?’ Bill chuckled. He picked up his teacup, which looked like a toy in his big hairy hand. He worked an overhead crane at the factory – had done all through the war, while they were making tanks instead of railway carriages. ‘You’ll never get that one past yer nan.’
‘Please, Nanna?’
‘Ooh, no, I’m not having animals in my house – they’re dirty,’ Edna said.
Em immediately felt that she wanted Robbie to be able to have a dog, even though she wasn’t too fussed about animals either.
‘One day, son,’ Norm said. ‘When we’ve got our own house – then you can have a dog.’
Robbie’s face lit up with excitement. He looked tanned and healthy from their afternoon in Aston Park. ‘Can I, Dad? When? When’re we going to get our own house?’
Norm ruffled his son’s cropped hair. ‘I
don’t know, son. When our boat comes in, I think – that’ll be the time.’
Robbie’s brow creased. ‘We ain’t got a boat – have we?’
When Em and Norm went to bed that night, Norm was chattering, as if to break through the silence that seemed to have grown up between them. He talked about the fishing and his mates, and what they’d seen going along the cut and the people they’d met.
The big bed took up most of their room and there was just space for a couple of chairs and a chest of drawers, which they shared.
Em stood barefoot on the lino, brushing out her hair in front of the tilted mirror on the chest of drawers. She took her hairgrips out and laid them out carefully. Without her hair pinned back, and in her nightdress, she looked younger. She turned and got into bed.
‘All right, love?’ Norm asked, when she pulled the bedclothes up rather huffily.
Underlying her anger was the answer she never gave him. We can’t have a baby, because you went with that woman and caught some horrible disease, and now you can’t make babies. She had laughed at the time – well, in the end – and tried to forgive him. Norm thought that was all long forgotten. But they had made Robbie before – so why not now?
But she knew she wasn’t going to say it – not that. She lay back, looking at the ceiling for a moment. Things could be better between them, even despite that. They had to be. She turned to him suddenly.
‘Norm, you know what you said tonight, about us getting our own house?’
‘Huh, yeah. Pigs might fly.’
‘But d’you want us to get our own place – really?’ Sometimes she thought he’d be just as happy living here forever with his mom.
‘Well, yes, course. But you know what it’s like.’
‘But if we really tried – there must be places to rent if we looked around. If we tried a bit harder.’
‘Oh, I dunno,’ Norm said fatalistically. He gave a huge yawn. ‘We’re on the council list. I don’t know there’s much else we can do about it.’
Em lay back, suddenly burning with determination. ‘But if we tried,’ she insisted. She could tell Norm was almost asleep. Norm nearly always seemed to go to sleep whenever she wanted to talk about anything.
‘Night, love.’ He patted her haunch and turned on his side, soon dead to the world.
Well, you may not be prepared to try and make it happen, but I’ve had enough, she thought. I don’t want to go on like this, so something’s got to change!
Forty-Two
Em’s determination to try and find a new place to live unfortunately could not overrule the reality – that there was nowhere to be had. The odd room would come up for rent, but precious little else. The bombing had destroyed many houses, and others were rotting away of their own accord. Families anxious to settle after the years of war were having babies at a rate of knots, and many were in her position, crammed in with parents and in-laws, or even living in old prisoner-of-war camps or disused railway carriages. There was simply not enough to go round. The council had tens of thousands on the waiting list. The newspapers talked about slum clearance.
Bob, her dad, kept saying, ‘They’ll have this place down, then – you wait and see.’
‘We’re not living in a slum, Bob!’ Cynthia would protest crossly. ‘I’ve always kept our house nice.’
There was much talk by the city planners, but the action was very slow. Set against all this, Em felt guilty.
‘It’s not so bad where you are,’ another young mother reproached her, when she talked about her longing to find somewhere else. ‘You don’t even have the babby sleeping in with you – that’s flaming luxury, that is! Some people don’t know when they’re well off.’
It was true, Em thought. There were so many worse off – and Edna’s house was clean into the bargain. And it wasn’t as if Edna was a tyrant, like some. Em felt almost ashamed of her sense of frustration. After those war years, married but stuck at home with Mom and Dad, was it asking too much to hope for a married life where she could run her own house and be in charge of her own kitchen?
‘What about one of them prefab places?’ she said to Norm one night, once they were alone. ‘They look quite nice.’
‘Aren’t they on the council list like the rest?’ he said.
Em sighed, knowing he was right. Suddenly she started crying, curling up on her side in bed.
‘Eh, Em! What’s brought all this on?’ He sounded bewildered.
‘I just want things to be different,’ she sobbed. As usual what she wanted to say came out wrong. She couldn’t seem to say what she really meant: that she wanted to feel that the two of them were close again and that, despite living with all these people, she was lonely. ‘I wish we had our own house.’
‘Oh now, love,’ Norm said. He snuggled up behind her. ‘I know you do – but we haven’t got a magician with a wand to find one just like that. We’ll have our own little place eventually. But it’s not so bad here, is it? Mom and Dad’ve been good to us and they could’ve kicked up a fuss, having us foisted on them. I think our mom’s enjoying having her grandson living with her. Come on – let’s look on the bright side, eh?’
He leaned over and kissed her cheek and she twisted round and cuddled into his arms, sniffing.
‘D’you still love me, Norm?’ she asked sadly.
‘Course I do – you’re my wife!’ He pushed his body against her. ‘D’you want me to prove it?’
Em edged away. ‘No, it’s all right. Let’s go to sleep.’ Why did Norm think that doing that would always make everything all right? In some ways it made things worse.
She lay awake once he was fast asleep, the darkness broken by a dim streak of light from between the curtains. More tears ran silently down her cheeks. If only they could have another baby. If Norm was there to see it grow up this time, things would be different and he’d be more enthusiastic than he had been about Robbie. Em had loved looking after a baby, feeling its need of her. With a heavy sigh she turned on her side to try and sleep. It was no good moaning. She’d just have to keep going and make the best of things.
A few days later, when the front doors were all open to let in the warm evening air while they were eating tea, there was an urgent hammering from the front.
‘Sounds like trouble,’ Edna said, getting up.
They all listened. Em heard sobbing from the front door.
‘That’s our Vi!’
She hurried to the door and had time to take in Edna’s sorrowful expression before Violet burst out, ‘Oh, Em – it’s our dad. They’ve taken him to the hospital! He went all funny and he can’t speak or walk properly or anything.’
‘Sounds like a stroke,’ Edna said, half to herself.
Norm had joined them in the hall by now. ‘You go back with her, love,’ he said. ‘Go and look after your mom.’
‘Joyce is with her,’ Violet said. She was shaking from the shock.
‘You’d best take a few things in a bag – you’ll need to stop over,’ Edna said.
Em did as she was advised, glad suddenly of Edna’s practical nature when she couldn’t think straight.
‘Go on, love,’ Norm said, when she came down.’ He kissed her cheek. ‘You do what you’ve got to do. Robbie’ll be all right.’
Em looked gratefully at him. ‘Thanks, love – but I’ll be back soon. Thanks, Edna. Come on, Vi – let’s get over there.’
Bob had been taken to Dudley Road Hospital.
‘I could see in his eyes how frightened he was,’ Cynthia wept when Em and Violet got back to the house. She and Joyce were sitting at the table, both red-eyed. Cynthia dabbed her face with the hem of her apron. ‘He’s never been in a hospital in his life, except when I was – you know – when I was in there. But that was different. And that place . . . To him it’s still the workhouse. I hated having to see him go in there.’
The three girls exchanged looks. They all hated the thought of it too.
‘We must tell Sid what’s happened,’ Cynthia was
fretting. She got up and then sank back down again, wanting to busy herself with something, but unable to think what.
‘Just sit down and have a rest for a bit, Mom,’ Em said. She felt older and, as usual, as if she was the one who had to take charge. ‘Tell us what happened?’
‘It just came on, when he came in from work – gradual like. He couldn’t seem to find his words to start with, and then suddenly the side of his face went all sort of twisted and funny . . .’ More tears came as she recalled it all. ‘He was all mithered – I could see there was something really bad wrong with him. I said, “Bob, what is it? Can you tell me?” And I could see he couldn’t . . . That was when I sent Violet down to the phone box . . . Oh!’ She looked round at them all, frightened. ‘I don’t think he’s going to come home!’
The next days were spent waiting, taking it in turns to visit the hospital with Cynthia.
The first time Em visited the hospital she felt sick with nerves. They went through town, and it would have been nice, a trip out with her mom on their own, had it not been for something so sad. The day was warm, but drizzly, the sky grey and oppressive. They walked along the Dudley Road together in summer frocks and cardies, sharing an umbrella.
‘Mom, your bag keeps banging against me.’
‘Sorry – here, I’ll put it on the other arm.’ Cynthia had a string bag containing some offerings for Bob, including bananas that Em had got from Mr Perry and a few sweets.
‘I don’t like it round here much,’ Em said, peering out. ‘Gives me the creeps.’
In that small area just north of the centre of Birmingham, the hospital, which had once had the workhouse attached to it, the prison and the asylum had all been built huddled together, almost like one vast and forbidding red-brick institution. The asylum in particular brought back too many dark memories, though Cynthia had never been in this particular one.
‘I know what you mean,’ Cynthia said. But her face was tight and preoccupied. She had aged overnight, little lines round her mouth.
