Birmingham Blitz (5 page)

That was my trouble with jobs. If I wasn’t kept on the run I got bored. And not just a bit yawning bored, but screaming and running round the room sort of bored. I’d done all sorts: sticking Bo-Peep stickers on babies’ cots, taking calls for a taxi firm where I got so fed up I gave the windows a going over in my spare time . . . Soon as it got too slow my head filled with fog and my legs went heavy as brass weights. That was when it was time to look for something else.

As I was tidying I heard a click, and a voice said, ‘. . . we’re on number twelve platform at Waterloo Station . . .’

My head jerked up. ‘A wireless!’

Mr Palmer nodded, pleased with himself. It was at the end of the counter, a little box with a curved top and nothing like as grand as Gloria, but the reception was quite clear.

‘Thought I’d bring it in,’ he said, through a cloud of blue smoke. ‘Didn’t want to miss anything. Funny times these.’

‘. . . the train’s in,’ the voice was saying, ‘and the children are just arriving . . . the tiny tots in front . . . they’re all merry and bright, we haven’t had a single child crying and I think they’re all looking forward to this little adventure . . . The whistle goes, the children are looking out . . . and in a moment this train moves out to an unknown destination . . .’ We heard the sound of the train chugging hard and loud, finally dying away. I thought of Eric sobbing his little heart out. Was he the only child in England not ‘merry and bright’?

‘You all right?’ Mr Palmer asked. He twizzled the knob and the wireless went off.

I started to fill up a bit then. ‘It’s my brother Eric. He’s eight. He’s gone today.’

Mr Palmer tutted and shook his head. ‘Terrible,’ he said. ‘They said they had it all sorted out the last time. Mind you, wench, it’s for the best. They say this one’ll start with bombing. If my kids were young I’d want ’em right out of it. Anyhow—’ he winked at me— ‘they reckon if anything happens it’ll be finished by Christmas.’

The rush started, with all the Sunday best going out again, as if it was going to be just any old normal weekend. Then we heard Mrs Wiles coming. She lived round the corner on Balsall Heath Road and she’d bring in bundles for the neighbours. You could hear her coming from half way up the road, pushing the rottenest old wheelbarrow you’ve ever seen.

Mr Palmer turned to give me a wink. ‘Oh – ’ere we go.’

The first we saw of her was her behind because she turned and shoved the door with it, too hard, so it flew open and the bell almost turned itself over ringing. She pulled the barrow down over the step with a loud ‘thunk’ so I wondered if that would be its last time, and stood blinking for a second or two, in her old man’s cloth cap, a sacking apron and man’s boots tied with string. She can’t have been much different in age from my nan, but her face looked like an old potato.

‘Mrs Johnson wants two shilling for this,’ she said, picking up Mrs Johnson’s bundle of washing.

Mr Palmer looked her in the eye over his glasses. ‘One and nine.’

‘Two shilling. She wants two shilling.’

‘One and nine.’

Every week it was the same, and the look she gave him, I was laughing that much bent over the counter that I could barely write out the tickets.

‘Oh you bloody fool,’ she said, screwing up her leathery face. ‘Oh, you old miser.’

They went through this with every bundle on the barrow. She counted and recounted the coins Mr Palmer gave her, and pushed them into a little pouch which she had tucked into her waistband.

This was all part of the normal performance. But what wasn’t part of it was that this week she looked a lot more agitated than usual, couldn’t seem to find her waist at all and was pulling at her long skirt as if she thought something might drop out of it. Then she started making funny noises like a guinea pig. Mr Palmer glanced anxiously at me.

‘You all right, Mrs Wiles?’ He pulled up the flap in the counter to get through and then just stood there while Mrs Wiles suddenly clutched at her chest, fingers clenched and head back pulling the chicken skin under her chin tight, and then dropped to the floor, pawn tickets fluttering from her.

‘Oh Lor’,’ Mr Palmer said, looking down at her. ‘Genie – what do we do?’

‘Her pulse.’ I ducked under too and knelt by Mrs Wiles’s slumped body. ‘I’ll feel for her pulse. You go and get help.’

Mr Palmer charged out of the shop, probably faster than he’d moved in thirty years, and I found myself alone once again with a dead old lady. Because she was dead. I felt the faint pulse flicker, then disappear in her wrist. I folded her hands together over her chest, except one of them kept dropping off. Other customers started coming in.

‘What’s Mrs Wiles doing down there?’ the first woman asked.

‘She’s dead.’ My knees were shaking.

‘Oh you poor kid! Did she just . . .? Where’s Reg Palmer?’

I shrugged. ‘Gone to get help.’

By the time Mr Palmer came back with Mrs Palmer, who was fat and usually jolly but not at the moment as someone’d just died, there was quite a crowd in the shop, waiting with their tickets and standing round the walls because Mrs Wiles was taking up such a lot of the floor.

‘Her son’s coming,’ Mrs Palmer said after tutting. ‘He’s arranging transport. In the meantime . . .’

Since we couldn’t leave Mrs Wiles where she was, the Palmers and I stowed her behind the counter. Mrs P found an old sheet on a shelf.

‘No one’ll be wanting that back now,’ someone remarked.

Course, there was barely room to move behind there, and I had to work with one foot on either side of her legs.

When things had settled down a bit Mr Palmer said, ‘Oi – it’s news time.’ It was ten-thirty. He switched on the wireless.

The customers in the shop stood stock still as we heard it. Afterwards, everyone was coming in with their lips all in position as they got through the door to say, ‘Have you heard? I suppose you’ll have heard by now?’ It was on everyone’s face. ‘They’ve gone into Poland. The Germans have invaded Poland. We’re for it now.’ One lady was crying. Her son was twenty and she hadn’t forgotten the last war, lost two brothers.

What about my dad? I wondered. The air crackled with goings on, with nerves. I knew everything was changing and everyone thought it was very serious, that the kerbstones on the Moseley Road had been painted black and white for the blackout, that my brother had been taken from us.

It wasn’t until the afternoon that Carl Wiles turned up to pick up his mom, and then not with very good grace. I saw Mrs Wiles carted out to his van like a sack of onions. I wondered if anyone had ever really loved her. And I thought, surely, surely there’s got to be more to existence than slaving your fingers to the bone all your life and then dropping dead in a pawn shop and no one really caring whether you do or not?

The thought of Mom in a soggy heap was too much for me straight after work so I went to my nan’s, which felt just as much like home. I knew I could tell her about Mrs Wiles passing on in front of me and she’d listen.

Belgrave Road was a wide, main street sloping down from the Moseley Road to the Bristol Road. Nan lived almost at the top, had done for years, in one of the yards down an entry behind the shops. As you went down the hill the houses gradually got bigger and bigger and at the bottom end there were some really posh ones. Nanny Rawson started her working life in one of those, in service to a family called the Spiegels, soon after the turn of the century. She didn’t get paid in money, they gave her bits of clothes and food instead. She’d lived in three different houses in Belgrave Road, and, as Mom was forever reminding us, Nan brought up her three surviving children at about the same level of poverty as everyone else in the back-to-back courts of houses. Poor as grinding poor back then, after the Great War, not knowing from one day to the next if my grandad would be in work or out of it, drunk or sober. Their clothes shop was the heap tipped out in the yard by the rag and bone man.

‘We couldn’t shop three days ahead in them days,’ Mom’d say (oh, here we go). ‘It was hand to mouth. Your grandad was out of work and your nan in the factory, until she got that shop . . . You got an ounce of jam at a time in a cup, if you was lucky. Your nan was up in the brew’us at five in the morning doing other people’s washing to make ends meet.’ Mom’d never forget it, scrubbing at the top of shoes with barely any soles on them, never knowing a full stomach, coats on the bed and the house lousy and falling down round their ears. Nan had struggled to give her kids better and Mom knew to hold on tight to what she’d got.

The road was full of the smell of hops from Dare’s Brewery and the whiff of sawn wood from the timber merchant’s down opposite Hick Street. On the corner stood the Belgrave Hotel, and Nan’s huckster’s shop was across the road with a cobbled entry running along the side of it which ran into the yard. The shop’s windows had advertisements stuck to them for Brasso, Cadbury’s, Vimto and such a collection of others that you could hardly see in or out. Her house, which backed on to the shop, was attic-high – three floors, one room on each, and in the downstairs you could walk through the scullery, lift up a little wooden counter and you were in the shop.

I was almost there when Nan’s shop door flew open, bell jangling like mad, and two girls tumbled out shrieking and spitting like cats. One had a heap of blond hair and long, spindly legs pushed into a pair of ankle-wobbling high black patent heels. The other had crimpy red hair and a skin-tight skirt, scarlet with big white polka dots, and showing a mass of mottled leg.

‘You mardy old bitch!’ the blonde yelled into the shop at the top of her lungs. As she did so, she caught her heel in the brick pavement and fell over backwards, white legs waving. ‘Now look what you’ve made me do, you fucking cow!’

The redhead was helping her up. ‘You wanna watch it – we can have you seen to, grandma . . .’

Nanny Rawson loomed in the doorway, enormous in her flowery pinner crossed over at the back, face grimmer than a storm at sea. Bandaged leg or no, she was out of that door in a jiffy, giving the redhead a whopping clout round the face that nearly floored her. The girl set up a train-whistle shriek, as much from wounded pride as from pain, which brought people out of the shops to stare and grin.

‘All right, Edith?’ someone shouted. ‘That’s right – you give ’em one!’ Nanny Rawson ignored them.

‘Get this straight,’ she barked at the girls. ‘You may be Morgan’s latest tarts but while you’re in my shop you behave like proper ’uman beings and keep a civil tongue in your ’eads. Don’t come in ’ere showing off to me. And if you want to come through and up my stairs—’

‘They ain’t your stairs, they’re Morgan’s,’ the redhead retorted, hand pressed to her cheek. ‘And there’s bugger all you can do about it. ’Cept move of course, and do everyone a favour.’

Nan bunched her hand into a fist and the redhead quailed. ‘Don’t hit me again!’ she pleaded, backing off.

The blonde had got to her feet by this time. Now I was closer I saw she had pale, pitted skin, thickly caked in powder, and can’t have been that much older than me. If she’d been thinking of having another go at Nan she changed her mind, knowing she’d more than met her match, and turned on me instead. ‘And what d’you think you’re gawping at, you nosy little bitch?’

Nanny Rawson suddenly saw me too, and she didn’t like her family getting involved with Morgan and his women. She rounded on the girls. ‘Get inside there quick. For my own state of health I’m going to forget I ever saw you.’ As they teetered back in through the door she shouted after them, ‘Coming to him two at a time. It’s disgusting!’ There was a cheer from the bystanders which Nanny Rawson, on her dignity, completely ignored.

Her run-ins with the landlord Morgan and his endless parade of ‘young trollops’ had been going on since she started renting the place nigh on sixteen years ago, and she and Morgan, a scrawny, over-sexed weasel of a man, were growing old together. When Nan first got the shop she was desperate to keep the lease and was beholden to Morgan for keeping the rent low. Now she’d been here this long she wasn’t going anywhere for anyone and Morgan knew he’d never get a better tenant. It had developed into a contest – who could hold out there the longest. But the fact that the only way to get to the upstairs was through the shop meant that Nan had had her nose rubbed in his preoccupations week in, week out, and even after all this time there was no chance of her accepting it.

As soon as the girls disappeared it was as if nothing had happened. Suddenly her face was full of doom. Hitler. Poland.

‘What you doing ’ere?’ she demanded.

‘Come to see you, what else?’

‘You don’t look too good – seen your mother, ’ave you?’

‘No. Why?’

She jerked her head towards the door. ‘You’d best come in.’

Nan’s shop had seemed like a magic palace to me when I was a kid. You couldn’t see across the room much better than you could through the windows, there was that much stuff in there. She sold everything you could think of: sweets, kids’ corduroy trousers, balls of string, gas mantles, mendits for pots and pans, paraffin, safety pins, scrubbing brushes. There were glass-fronted wooden cabinets where I used to bend down and breathe on the glass, see my ghostly eyes disappear into mist. Inside, rows of little wooden drawers held all sorts of bits and bobs, spools of cotton, hooks and eyes, ribbons. There were flypapers, brushes and paraffin lamps from the ceiling, and shelves round the sides and across the middle.