Birmingham Blitz (6 page)

Nan folded her arms and stared at me. ‘You’d best get home. Doreen’ll need you. It’s your dad. Soon as the news came out this morning they started calling up the territorials – ’e’s already gone.’

‘Gone?’ I couldn’t understand her for a minute. ‘Where?’

‘Into the army, Genie.’ She softened, seeing the shock on my face. It was all too much in one day. Eric, Mrs Wiles, and now this. ‘He’s not far away. He’ll be back to see you. Come on—’ She led me by the shoulder, through the back into the house. ‘Your mother’ll cope while you have a cup of tea. It’s just as much of a shock for you as for ’er, though no doubt she won’t see it that way.’

I sat by the kitchen table which was scrubbed almost white. Nan’s house was always immaculate, even with Lil’s kids living there. She still prepared all her food on the old blackleaded range which gleamed with Zebo polish. She rocked round the table from foot to foot, rattling spoons, taking the teapot to empty the dregs in the drain outside. I looked at her handsome, tired face. Always here, Nan was. Always had been, with her hair, still good and dark now, pinned up at the back. She’d always been the one who looked after everyone: Doreen this, Len that, Lil the other. Slow old Len always here, round her, until he came to us. And now she was half bringing up the next generation.

I watched her pour the tea into two straight, white cups. There was shouting from the yard outside, getting louder, rising to shrieks. The sound of women bitching. Nan eyed the window and tutted. ‘Mary and Clarys again.’

‘You all right, Nan?’

‘As I’ll ever be.’

I went and looked out of the door into the yard. Two of Nan’s neighbours, Mary and Clarys, were up the far end by the brewhouse, Mary with her red hair, hands on her hips, giving Clarys a couple of fishwifey earsful. Little Patsy, Tom and Cathleen had been playing round the gas lamp with another child. Usually there’d have been a whole gang of them out there. They’d stopped to watch, Tom, my favourite, swinging round the lamp by one straight arm.

‘Wonder what’s got into them two,’ I said.

‘Be summat to do with Mary’s kids again,’ Nan said. ‘Right ’andful they are.’

The bell rang in the shop. Nan stood still, teapot in hand, listening as the door was pushed carefully shut. There were furtive footsteps on the front stairs. Morgan had arrived. His life was strung between his mom, who he lived with over his ironmonger’s shop in Aston, and his bolt-hole here. Nan carried on with what she was doing, which nowadays was exactly what she would have done if Morgan was in the same room. It was the girls who could still get under her skin, but Morgan, so far as she was concerned, was invisible, like a tiny speck of dirt. He crept in and out with an ingratiating smile on his face, and what was left of his streaks of greasy hair brushed over so they lay across his head like something fished out of a river.

I sat back down and within minutes we heard Lil. ‘Awright, awright,’ she was saying to the kids. ‘Let me at least get in through the sodding door.’

‘I see them two are at it again,’ she said, flinging herself down on the horsehair sofa, in the worn cotton dress she wore to work at Chad Valley Toys. She put a hand over her eyes. ‘She wants to keep them kids in order she does. My head’s fit to split.’

Nan handed her a cup of tea and stood in front of her, hands on hips. ‘You having second thoughts?’ There was silence. ‘’Bout sending the kids?’

‘No I’m not!’ Lil sat upright quick as a flash, then winced at the pain in her head. ‘I’m not having anyone else lay a finger on them. Sending the poor little mites off to fend for themselves.’

At that moment the three ‘poor little mites’ roared in through the door at full volume. ‘Mom! Mom! – what’s to eat? We’re starving!’

‘Out!’ Lil yelled over the top of them. ‘Stop “Mom-ming” me when I’ve only just got in. You can push off out of ’ere till your nan says tea’s ready!’

The room emptied again. The voices had quietened down outside but Lil’s boys started drumming a stick on the miskin-lids down the end of the yard. Lil groaned, then sat up and drank her tea, pulling pins out of her hair so that hanks of it hung round her face.

‘That foreman won’t leave me alone again. I’m sick to the back teeth of it.’ Lil was forever moaning about men chasing her. It was such a nuisance, the way they wouldn’t leave her alone . . . None of us believed a word. She loved every minute of it.

Nan ignored her. ‘Victor’s gone you know. Dor was up here earlier in a state. Called ’im up straight away.’

Lil stared back at her. ‘Bejaysus.’ She often said that. It was one of Patsy’s sayings and she clung to it. ‘I didn’t think it’d be so soon. They haven’t said there’s going to be a war yet. Not for sure.’

‘Looks mighty like it though.’

‘Poland,’ Lil said with scorn. She lit a fag and sat back. ‘Where the hell is Poland anyhow?’

Nan sat on the edge of her chair, sipping tea. ‘I’ve cleared out the cellar.’

‘What for?’

‘What d’you think for? I’m not going out in those public shelters with just anyone. There’s not much space down there but we can fit and it’ll have to do. I’ve given it a scrub.’

‘Charming. Reducing us to sitting in the cellar.’

‘Want some bread and scrape, Genie?’ Nan said.

‘No, I’m all right, ta. Nan?’

‘What, love?’

I told her about Mrs Wiles.

‘Well, what a thing,’ she said. ‘I thought you was looking a bit shook up. Poor old dear.’

‘Shame.’ Lil took a drag on her cigarette. ‘Be much nicer to die in Lewis’s, wouldn’t it?’

‘Better not tell Doreen,’ Nan said. ‘She’ll only say that’s what you get for working in a pawn shop up ’ere.’ Mom put on a show of thinking people in Highgate were common, which was rich considering she grew up there herself. When I got the job I didn’t tell her for days.

‘You’d better be moving on,’ Nan said to me. ‘Got to see to this blackout palaver tonight. Your mother never got it done for the practice, did she? She won’t want all that on ’er own.’

‘She’s all right – it’s light yet,’ Lil said. She seemed to be coming round a bit now she’d got some tea inside her. ‘Eric get off all right, did he?’

I nodded, miserable at the thought. Lil sat forward, her old sweet self for a moment. ‘You’ll miss him, won’t you Genie love? But he’ll be all right. He’s a good boy.’ She smiled at me prettily. ‘You’ll have to come round and see my lot when you want some company.’

I found Mom in tears of course, with Len taking not the blindest bit of notice. It wasn’t that he lacked sensitivity. He’d most likely just given up by now. Soon as he got in from work he usually sat down by Gloria without even washing his hands unless we nagged him, and that was that.

‘My boy!’ Mom was carrying on behind her hanky. There was no sign of tea on the go. ‘My poor little Eric. How will we ever know if they’re looking after him properly?’

I felt impatient, although all day I’d had nothing but the same thought in my mind. ‘Oh, I expect he’ll have a grand time,’ I said bitterly. ‘Forget we exist.’

‘But that’s what I’m worried about!’ Mom wailed. She flung herself up out of her chair, dabbing at her red eyes. ‘First I’ve got no son, and now I haven’t even got a husband!’ She clicked the stair door open and disappeared upstairs, slamming it behind her.

‘She’s crying,’ Len remarked.

‘You don’t say, Lenny.’

I was really fed up with her. Sometimes I’d have liked to be the one who could flounce about and cry and behave like a child. I got sick of being a mother to my own mom. I wanted someone to sit down and put their arm round me while I cried because my dad and my brother had gone away.

‘I s’pose this means I’m cooking tea, does it?’ I snapped at Len, since he was the only person left to snap at, though I got no answer anyway.

There was liver in the kitchen. I started chopping onions. Len fiddled with Gloria until music came streaming from her. I felt a bit better. Len beamed. ‘S’nice this, Genie, in’t it?’

There was a voice kept coming on as I was cooking, saying we had to retune the wireless. Len was taking no notice, didn’t understand.

I wiped my hands and went over. ‘Len, the man says we’ve got to turn the knob to a different number.’ Len stared blankly at me. I went and fiddled with Gloria’s dial and Len got a bit agitated.

Just as I was dishing up, this voice said, ‘This is the BBC Home Service.’ I’d just called Mom down and we looked at each other expecting something else to happen.

‘The what?’ Mom shrugged and stepped over to look at herself in the mirror – ‘What a sight’ – then, as the light was waning outside, went round the windows, pulling all the black curtains she’d made. ‘This should’ve been done earlier,’ she said accusingly, pulling the ordinary curtains over them. ‘I’ll have to do upstairs tomorrow. Well this
is
going to be jolly I can see. Feels like the middle of winter.’

My liver and onions wasn’t out of this world, though no worse than Mom would’ve managed, but she still turned her nose up at it.

‘Gravy’s lumpy. And how did you get the liver so hard?’

We waited, tensed up as the nine o’clock bulletin came on, but there was nothing new, nothing definite, except that Australia had said she’d support the Allies if war broke out.

‘Who are the Allies?’ I asked.

‘Us of course.’

When we turned Gloria off, finally, to go up to bed, it was eerily quiet. There wasn’t a sound from outside. Wasn’t something supposed to be happening?

‘I wonder what Victor’s doing,’ Mom said, turning all soggy again. ‘How could he do it to me?’

Saturday 2 September. The day of waiting.

It had been a golden afternoon, the city’s dark bowl lit by autumn sun. Two blokes whitewashing the entrance to an ARP post whistled at me on the way home. The balloons sailed in the sky, tugging gently on their lines.

What’s up now? I wondered, stepping in from work that evening. The house was quiet again but I could hear music in the distance. They were out in the garden, Gloria too, on a paving slab with her accumulator. Someone was playing ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ on the organ with twiddly bits.

At the end of the garden, next to the wizened lilac tree, its mauve flowers now brown, stood Mom, Len and Mr Tailor from two houses along. They were all looking at a big, grey loop of corrugated iron and two other flat bits which were leant up against the fence. The Anderson shelter had arrived.

‘’Ullo Genie!’ Len boomed across at me. The others didn’t seem to notice if I was there or not.

Mom was all worked up. ‘Isn’t this just the limit?’ She lit one cigarette from the stub end of another and sucked on it like a sherbet dip. ‘Isn’t it just like Victor to go away the day before the shelter gets here. How am I ever going to cope with all this?’

‘Look, love, you’re awright – I’ve said I’ll do it,’ Mr Tailor said. He was always the philosopher, Mr Tailor. Maybe because he had a grown up son whose testicles had never come down. Nan said with something like that in the family there was no point in getting worked up about anything else. He’d most likely be there on his own deathbed in the same grey braces saying, ‘Yer awright, bab – things’ll look better in the morning.’

‘I’ll sort it out for you, soon as I’ve finished my own. I’m not going anywhere, am I? Too long in the tooth for that caper. Look – you just have to dig down and put this bit in the ground—’ He pointed to the big curved bit which I saw was two sheets of metal bolted together at the top. ‘Then you put the soil back over the top, these bits are the front and back, and Bob’s your uncle.’

Len had already got the spade and was all for starting off.

‘He could do it if I show him,’ Mr Tailor went on. ‘Big strong lad.’

Mom was hugging her waist. I could see the shape of the Players packet in the pocket of her pinner. ‘Looks more like a dog kennel. I certainly don’t fancy sitting out in that of a night.’

‘It’s tougher than it looks,’ Mr Tailor said, slapping his thick, hairy hand on the side of it. ‘I’ll come and give Len a hand finishing it tomorrow – how’s that?’

Mom nodded. ‘Look, I’ve got to get in and finish these flaming blinds. Been queuing half the morning for the material . . .’

The organ music which had gone on and on stopped suddenly. ‘Sssh,’ I said. ‘Listen!’

We walked back over the toasted daisies and stood round Gloria.

‘This is the BBC Home Service . . . Here is the six o’clock news . . .’

Everyone stood still. Mr Tailor raised one hand in the air, flat as if he was pushing against an invisible wall.

The government had given a final ultimatum to Hitler. Withdraw from Poland or we declare war. They’d given him until the next morning.

When it was over, another voice said, ‘This is Sandy MacPherson joining you again on the BBC organ . . .’

‘Not again,’ Mom said. ‘That bloke must be exhausted. He’s been stuck on that flaming organ all day.’ As she disappeared into the house she added, ‘Why does that Hitler have to do everything on the weekend?’

The sun went down slowly, though not slowly enough for Mom, who was still toiling away on the Vesta, the reel of black cotton flying round on the top, cursing to herself.

Without being told, I picked up the idea pretty quick that I was cooking tea. I saw there was a rabbit hanging by its hind legs in the pantry. Mom said Mr Tailor had got it somewhere. Don’t ask, sort of thing. ‘That’s for dinner tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Do summat with eggs tonight.’