Birmingham Blitz (7 page)

When I’d got the spuds on, I went and stood out in the garden. Len was working like mad digging out turf and soil, dry though it was. He was droning some kind of tune and he didn’t look back or see me.

I took my shoes off, felt the wiry grass under my feet and wondered what it’d be like to live in the country with nothing but grass and trees. I wondered about Eric. The street was so quiet. Usually it was full of kids playing, in the gardens and out the front.

And I thought this evening was like no other I’d ever known. Not even the night I left school when I knew I was going to a job next week and everything else would be the same, not like Christmas Eve, even though there was the same sort of quiet. Everything was shifting, you could feel it all around you, those balloons filling in the sky. No one had a clue what was going to happen tomorrow.

I didn’t know whether to be excited or frightened.

Mom still didn’t manage to black out the whole house by sundown. ‘Cotton kept breaking,’ she complained. She wasn’t very good at sewing either.

We ate scrambled egg and potatoes. Len ate astonishing heaps of mash. It was a queer feeling sitting there with the windows all muffled. Made you feel cut off, as if you were in prison. And Mom decided for reasons of her own that we had to have the windows tight shut as well and nearly suffocated the lot of us.

None of us could settle to anything. Mom said she couldn’t stand the sight of any more sewing. So we sat round Gloria and listened in. She was our contact with the outside world: Sandy MacPherson, records, news. Parliament had sat in emergency session. Len slouched, picking his nose.

‘Don’t, Len!’ Mom scolded.

We sang along with ‘We’ll Gather Violets in the Spring’ and ‘Stay Young and Beautiful, If You Want to Be Loved.’

We wondered what tomorrow would bring. There was a storm in the night and I barely slept.

The Prime Minister was due to speak at eleven-fifteen. Mom was in the front at her machine again, tickety-tick, and I, who seemed to be cook for the duration, was stuck at the sink. Len was out digging, the ground softened by the rain.

It dried out to a perfect, calm morning, though the air was humid. I could hear church bells early on, then they stopped.

Our dinner was going to be late.

‘I can’t touch that thing,’ Mom said, pointing at the rabbit, its legs rigid against the door. ‘Make me bad, that would. You’ll have to skin it, Genie – we’ll have stew this afternoon.’

What a treat. Didn’t she always find me the best jobs?

I spread an old
Sports Argus
on the kitchen table. There were a couple of knives that needed sharpening and the kitchen scissors. It was a wild, brown rabbit with a white belly, and heavier than I expected. Its back legs were tied with string and it was sticky with a smear of blood where I touched it on one side. Its eyes looked like rotten grapes.

Before I got started I went and switched Gloria on and heard a band playing.

‘What time is it?’ Mom called through.

‘Five to eleven.’

There was a ring of blood like lipstick round the rabbit’s mouth. The ears felt very cold and there was a pong coming off it like fermented fruit.

It was a hell of a job to get the head off. Our knives sunk in deeper and deeper but wouldn’t break the pelt. In the end I snipped at the neck with the scissors, but it took so long it made me feel panicky, as if I was fighting with it.

The news came on on the hour. There was a knock at the front door.

‘Get that, will you Genie?’

‘Can’t – I’m all in a mess.’

I heard her sigh, like she always did if I asked her to do anything. Peeping into the hall I saw Molly and Gladys Bender from across the road. I knew Mom’d be thinking, oh my God. They both stood there with big grins on their faces, each of them the size of a gasometer, still in their pinners. Gladys was Molly’s mom and by far the sharper of the two. They lived together and both did charring and you almost never saw them without a pinner or an overall. They both wore glasses and both had their hair marcelled and probably had done since it was fashionable sometime round the year I was born. Molly looked the image of Gladys except that Gladys, being twenty years older, had hair that wasn’t exactly grey, but dusty looking, and Molly’s cheeks weren’t full of red wormy veins.

They were beaming away like a couple of mad March hares. ‘We was wondering,’ Gladys said in her blaring voice, ‘Mr Tailor said there’s to be an announcement – only, we haven’t got a wireless . . .’

So all Mom could really say was, ‘Why don’t you come in then?’ and called to me, ‘Genie – get the kettle on, love.’

Love? That was a sign we had company.

‘Don’t mind Genie,’ Mom said. ‘She’s doing our dinner.’

I caught a whiff of Molly and Gladys. There were grey smudges down their pinners and they always reeked of disinfectant and Brasso and sweat. Especially sweat, but it was always mixed in with all these cleaning fluids and polish. They sat down, filling the two chairs. Molly craned to see out to the garden.

‘Oooh,’ she said. ‘Your Len’s busy, in’t he? We could do with borrowing him.’

They chattered away to Mom, who was as polite as she could manage. I got into the rabbit by snipping up from under its tail with the scissors – tricky with me being left-handed – along the soft white belly. With the first cut a round hole appeared like a little brown mouth and the smell whooshed up and hit me. Lola. I opened it up and there was a pool of muck inside, and round it, holding everything in, a glassy film of pink, grey and white, tinged with yellow. The kettle whispered on the stove. It was ten past.

‘Shall I call Len in for you?’ Molly asked eagerly.

‘You stay put,’ Gladys bossed her.

I called down the garden. Len dropped the spade and loped up to the house. I don’t know if he knew why he was hurrying but he’d caught the atmosphere, something in my voice. He stamped his feet on the step outside.

‘It’s all right – nothing yet.’

I pushed my knife into the thin, tough film of the rabbit’s insides. There was blood everywhere suddenly. Soft jelly shapes slumped into my hand, cold trails of gut like pink necklaces, rounded bits with webs of yellow fat on them, green of half-digested grass when I pulled on its stomach and it tore. I knew which bit the liver was, rich with blood, four rubbery petals like a black violet.

When I’d got everything out it had gone quiet next door. Nice of them to call me, I thought, washing my hands. Mom, Molly, Gladys, Len and I all stood or sat round, everyone’s eyes fixed on Gloria.

‘I am speaking to you from the Cabinet Room at Number Ten Downing Street,’ the Prime Minister said. Words we’d never forget. The announcement of war.

‘Now that we have resolved to finish it, I know you will play your part with calmness and with courage.’

When Mr Chamberlain had finished they played the National Anthem. Molly and Gladys struggled grunting to their feet. Then church bells pealed from Gloria, filling the room. We drank tea. None of us spoke for a time. No one knew what to say. Molly and Gladys weren’t grinning any more.

‘So it’s finally happened,’ Mom said at last. ‘Len – you’d better go out and finish off. Mr Tailor’s coming later.’

Len wasn’t listening and nor was Molly, because they were staring hard at each other as if they’d never seen one another before, with great big soppy smiles on their faces. He walked backwards out of the room, tripping up the step into the kitchen.

‘I’ll have to watch him,’ Mom said when Molly and Gladys had departed, thanking us endlessly. ‘He may be soft in the head but he’s all man, our Len.’

‘I know,’ I said.

Her head whipped round. ‘What d’you mean, you know?’

I finally finished the rabbit, pulling back the skin from over the front legs like peeling a shirt off. The inside of the pelt was shiny and covered with hundreds of wiggly red veins like Gladys’s cheeks. When I got the skin off it looked small and helpless like a new-born babby. Tasted all right though, come three o’clock, with a few onions.

We waited for the peril that was supposed to fall from the clouds. That’s when people started staring up at the sky, heads back, eyes narrowed. The night war was declared I went out into the garden after it was dark. Mom was despondent because they’d announced in the afternoon that all the cinemas were going to close.

‘Life’s not going to be worth living!’ she kept on. I wanted to get out of our muffled rooms.

I leapt out of the back door closing it as fast as I could so’s not to spill any light. I walked down the garden. It was dark as a bear’s behind out there. Everything was quiet, deathly quiet I thought, really eerie.

At the bottom of the garden I could just make out the hunched shape of the Anderson which Mr Tailor had put in for us that afternoon. Len had heaped the soil back on top. It was odd seeing it there. A web of searchlights danced in the city sky, but down in the garden you could barely see a hand in front of your face. No lights from the street, the houses, the cars. Nothing.

I stumbled on a hummock of grass. Then there was a sound. Must’ve been a twig scraping the fence but it set me thinking, and my heart was off thudding away.

No one knew when the Germans would come. We’d expected them down the street straight away. Maybe they were here already. Was that what I’d heard, someone moving about in the garden next door? Or maybe there was someone in the Anderson . . . Someone just behind me with a gun . . .

Panic seized me tight by the throat and I was across that scrap of lawn and struggling with the door handle so mithered I could hardly get it open. I landed panting in the kitchen.

‘What’s got into you?’ Mom called through. There was a laugh in her voice.

One Sunday in the middle of September Mom was having one of her wet lettuce sessions. Lunch had been cooked by yours truly (I was getting a lot of practice). I’d done a piece of chine and Mom said, ‘This isn’t up to much, Genie. How d’you manage to make such a mess of it?’

So I said, ‘Cook it yourself next time if you’re so fussy.’ She slapped me for that, hard, at the top of my arm. Sod you too, I thought.

I knew what was wrong though. Partly the feeling of anticlimax.

‘You only have to strike a match out there at night and someone jumps on you,’ Mom moaned. ‘But there’s nothing cowing well happening, is there?’ You could tell she was under strain when her language started slipping.

Earlier in the week Dad had come home to tell us that his short period in Hall Green was finished and that they were being transferred for training outside Birmingham. He didn’t know where. Before he went, suddenly younger-looking in his uniform, I saw Mom go to him, and they held one another. He stroked her hair and she clung to him.

‘I can’t stand it,’ she sobbed into his chest. ‘Can’t stand being here on my own. I won’t be able to cope.’

‘You’ve got Genie,’ Dad said. ‘I’m sorry, love. I hadn’t realized it would all be so soon.’

She seemed to have more respect for him now he had an army uniform on. And I hadn’t seen Mom and Dad cuddling before, not ever. Made me cry too. And then Dad did something he’d not done since I was a tiny kid. He came and took me in his arms too and I saw there were tears in his big grey eyes.

‘Goodbye, Genie love. Eh, there’s a girl, don’t cry now. You’re going to help your mom out, aren’t you? I s’pect I’ll be back before we know it.’

Len was starting to blub too, watching us all, and Dad gave his shoulder a squeeze and then he was gone. I dried my tears. Didn’t like crying in front of Mom. It didn’t feel right.

She’d been all right up until Sunday. Even though we had a letter from Eric:

It was from Maidenhead. Mom sniffled a bit when she read it – ‘Not much of a letter, is it?’ – but then carried herself along being busy and was quite cheerful. She even had a mad cleaning session and the house was spotless. But finally she fell over the edge into gloom and sitting for hours in chairs without her shoes on.

So I left, and went to see my pal Teresa. She’d always been my best pal, ever since we were kiddies, although we were never at the same school. The Spini kids traipsed all the way over to the Catholic School in Bordesley Street. Teresa, who was always up to something the rest of the time, could dress up demure as a china doll on a Sunday with a white ribbon in her hair and go off to Mass at St Michael’s with Vera’s – Mrs Spini’s – family, who all lived in the streets of ‘Little Italy’ behind Moor Street Station. It was like stepping right into Italy down there, with them all speaking Italian and cooking with garlic. I used to go with Teresa and see her granny sometimes. Nonna Amelia was a wispy old lady with bowed legs and no teeth who always wore black and spoke hardly any English. She used to suck and suck on sugared almonds from home and spit the nuts out because she couldn’t chew them.

They had a back-house in a yard just along from my nan’s, though not behind the shop as they’d tiled that part white like a hospital and turned it into their little ice-cream factory. The door of the house was almost always open, summer or winter, and usually there were kids spilling in and out. When I got there I could see the back of Micky, Teresa’s dad, sat at the table in his shirtsleeves. He wore belts, not braces like my dad. I could hear their voices, loud, in Italian.