Now the War Is Over (3 page)

Melly knew that her mom and dad, Rachel and Danny, had fallen in love very young. They often told the story of how they had met on the Rag Market when Nanna Peggy, Rachel’s mother, had a
pitch there.

Whenever Mom told this story, when they were sitting round having Sunday tea or some such, Auntie Gladys would shift a bit in her chair, pulling her shawl round her, making her face at Dad which
meant she was pretending to be hard done by and say, ‘That was before I was landed with him day in, day out, the cheeky little sod. Heaven knows what I did to deserve that.’

A boyish grin would stretch across Dad’s face and he’d look from one to the other of them, tweak his cigarette from his mouth between the V of his fingers, blow out a lungful of
smoke and say, ‘Clapping eyes on me was the best day of both your lives, weren’t it?’

Melly and her brothers had all grown up living with their mom, dad and auntie Gladys. Gladys, a widow, had lived in the yard for over twenty years. She was a strong, striking-looking woman in
her fifties with a blade-like nose and piercing blue eyes. She had worked on the city’s Rag Market for years as a ‘wardrobe dealer’ selling second-hand clothes. Although she could
tease him about it now, Danny had come to be in her care for very sad reasons. When Gladys’s sister, Danny’s mother, died, Danny’s father couldn’t – and didn’t
want to – cope with his four children. He delivered Danny and his sisters into separate orphanages. Gladys tried to find out where they were, but she never did know where they had gone and as
there was no love lost between her and Danny’s father, he wouldn’t tell her. It was only when Danny reached fourteen years of age and was able to work that he got out and came to find
Gladys, who took him in. Though he found two of his sisters later, they were never really a family again and they had made their own lives outside the city. Rachel and Danny had married young and
had lived with Gladys in her tiny, but spick-and-span, house ever since.

Melly had never lived anywhere other than this yard, down an entry off Alma Street in Aston. She heard people talking about what a state the place was in, thanks to Hitler and
his bombs. But she was born just as the worst of the blitz on Birmingham began. She could not remember it any other way than it was now.

Hitler had certainly done his part and the district was pocked with damage, bomb pecks and water-filled craters, gaps along the rows of houses and factories, still full of rubble and now strewn
with weeds. Some of these made cut-throughs from street to street. Children played in them, hunting for shrapnel, mimicking spies, and shooting at each other with pretend guns. But even before
Hitler, Aston was an old, tightly packed industrial area of factories and warrens of leaking houses, their very brickwork eaten away by the industrial effluvia in the air and black with soot from
thousands of chimneys.

Everyone in Aston knew the smells – the hoppy blasts from Ansell’s brewery, the sour tang of vinegar from the HP Sauce factory when you walked near Aston Cross, depending on which
way the wind was blowing. You might get a sniff of Windsor Street gasworks, of factory chemicals, of mouth-watering vinegary chips from one of the fried-fish shops, or the sweet inviting smell from
the corner shop where the lady churned her own ice cream.

Melly knew these streets behind which were cramped yards of back-to-back houses: two houses under one roof. And most of all she knew the one court, or yard, where she had grown up.

Melly had become aware as she got a bit older that Nanna Peggy, Rachel’s mother, had never approved of the match between her mom and dad. Nanna, a proud, neat little
woman, very preoccupied with her clothes and appearance, lived in Hay Mills over the haberdasher’s shop she ran with her second husband, Fred Horton. With them lived their daughter Cissy,
Rachel’s much younger half-sister, who was born the day war broke out in 1939.

Peggy thought she had gone up in the world since marrying Fred and didn’t like to be reminded that she had once worked on the Rag Market as well. Nanna Peggy could be very snobby.
‘Tuppence looks down on a halfpenny,’ as Gladys said. Melly was angry with Nanna for the way she talked about Tommy, as if he didn’t matter, almost as if he wasn’t a person.
In fact it was her grandmother who had first made her feel an enraged sense of protection towards Tommy. She talked about him being a ‘spastic’ or a ‘cripple’, about having
Tommy ‘put away’ somewhere. Melly had never forgiven Nanna Peggy for that. None of them went to see her very often these days.

When Melly looked after Tommy and helped Mom, everyone said she was a good girl. Looking after people was the thing you were supposed to do. Tommy was a ‘cripple’ – as some
people said – who needed looking after. He needed his big sister to teach him things and help him. And Melly had seen close up what it meant when people didn’t look after each other.
She had seen Evie Sutton who lived across the yard.

Evie was born just after Tommy in 1943. Irene, her mother, wanted a boy. Ray, her husband, threatened to leave if she didn’t give him a boy. Lo and behold, she had a girl. Ray didn’t
leave – he stayed and got drunk as usual. Although Irene already had two daughters, she couldn’t seem to stand the sight of Evie. Sometime after Evie was born, Melly overheard, in the
yard gossip, that Irene had been very poorly and ‘had it all taken away’. Melly had no idea what this meant except that there was not, apparently, going to be any boy to follow Evie
– or any girl either.

Melly knew her mother kept an eye out for Evie – everyone did. Evie was an odd child. You’d come across her at the end of the yard somewhere, pulling a worm out of a patch of rough
ground and muttering to it. She was very pretty, blonde like her mother with huge blue eyes. But the other children, even though they felt sorry for her, also found her smelly and annoying. Her
sisters were mean to her. She was never clean, always a whiff about her. And she was always, always after something, wanting to play your games, come into your house, sit on your knee or whatever
it was but it was always too much and people ended up shooing her away.

‘That’s enough now, Evie – go on, stop mithering me – buzz off.’

But the glimpses Melly had had of the inside of Irene and Ray’s house, the bare walls, the dirt, the miserable-looking table with spilt milk and crumbs all over it, the scuttling bugs,
gave her the shivers. Auntie Gladys’s house was jerry-built just the same, but she worked hard to make sure it was decorated and clean inside.

Gladys had been a rock in all their lives. Melly thought of her as her other grandmother even though everyone called her Auntie. And Dolly and Mo and their family at number one had shown Gladys
the staunchest of support through good times and bad. Their boys were part of the scenery, of all that was familiar. As were the other neighbours, sour Ethel Jackman with her silent husband, and
dear old Lil Gittins at number five, caring for her shell-shocked husband Stanley. Melly felt happy to live in this yard, amid these streets with their factories, their neighbourliness, their
grime, their harshness. It would never have occurred to her to think of living anywhere else. Her school was just along the road, all the family she most cared about were here. It was Alma Street
– it was her world. And Tommy was her world as well.

‘Oh, no, I knew it, God help me!’ Rachel leaned against the scullery door as her body clenched in a powerful contraction. ‘Oh, why couldn’t it come when
there was school?’

Her face contorted and the muscles in her arms knotted tight. Her words were followed by a helpless moan of pain.

A queasy feeling grew inside Melly. Her mother was bent forward, her head bowed, dark hair twisted up and pinned roughly behind her head. A moment later she straightened up with a desperate
gasp.

‘Oh, no!’ It was a sob.

To her horror, Melly saw a creeping pool of liquid move across the floor from her mother’s feet. Rachel grabbed a rag and frantically wiped her legs. Melly’s sick feeling grew. Had
Mom wet herself? Not Mom, surely? She had never seen her mother like this before. She knew it was the baby but she didn’t know what to do. When Kev was born she had been safely asleep in bed
with Auntie here and Dad and a midwife.

‘It’s coming,’ Rachel panted. ‘Melly, go and get Dolly quick – tell her I’m having it!’

Gladys was out at church and Dad nowhere around either. Melly ducked her head against the rain pelting down into the yard.

‘Eh, bab, where’s the fire?’ Dolly Morrison joked as Melly hurtled in through the door of number one. Dolly was at the table, with Donna. Three of her lads were crouched round
the fire, cuffing each other for something to do on a soaking-wet Sunday morning.

‘It’s Mom, she says can you come she’s having it!’ Melly babbled, still only half understanding that ‘it’ was the new babby Mom had said was on its way.

‘Oh, my word –’ Dolly leapt up. ‘Come on, princess – you come with me.’ Little Donna, seated at the table, was five now. Dolly scooped her up and dashed for
the door. Melly followed.

‘Rach?’ Dolly took one look inside the door of number three. ‘Melly, go back and tell one of the lads to run for the midwife – get Reggie to go, he’s more chance of
finding the way.’

Melly stalled for a moment. Her, order Reggie, who was six years older than her and had already left school, out into the rain! She wouldn’t have minded asking Jonny or Freddie, the
younger boys who were fourteen and twelve. But since Reggie had come to her rescue with Tommy the other day, she had started to feel a sort of awe for him, although he never took any notice of her.
She was just a little squirt and a girl so far as Reggie was concerned, wasn’t she? How could she tell
Reggie
what to do! But she ran back to number one, heart pumping even harder
now.

Standing at the door, she found her courage to announce, ‘Reggie – your mom says you’re to go for the midwife.’

The three blonde boys all stared at her. They were good sorts really. But still lads. And older. Reggie raised his chin a little.

‘Wha’?’

‘You’ve gotta go,’ she insisted. ‘To get the midwife.’

To Melly’s surprise, Reggie got up. She was taken aback that she had managed to make this happen.

‘You gotta hurry an’ all,’ she added, gaining confidence, even though he was several heads taller than her. ‘The babby’s coming. Go on – quick!’ Reggie
pushed past her and she heard his boots clomping along the entry.

Back home, she found Dolly taking charge, putting on pans of water to boil, comforting Rachel and being motherly and reassuring. She had put little Donna, who was five, down at
the table next to Tommy. Donna, plump-cheeked, with a head of wavy black hair like her mother’s, was looking about her, seeming awed by what was going on. Kev was rattling about on the floor
with his cars. Kev never kept still for long.

Melly stood by the table, at a loss. Everything felt frightening and strange. Although Mom had told her and Tommy that they were going to have another brother or sister, Melly had only dimly
realized that the baby was inside Mom. She could hardly believe it. And she had no idea what was going to happen. She wanted comfort, though she hardly knew that was what she required.

‘Come on, Tommy, Donna,’ she said importantly. ‘We’re going to do some letters.’ She liked being Tommy’s teacher. Tommy had never been to school. Mom said
there was nowhere for him to go, unless they put him in a home and she was never going to do that. Melly liked teaching him things she learned at school. ‘Look – I’ll write them
out for you.’

As she leaned over to write big, careful letters in pencil, she could shut out the sight of her mother’s agonized face. But she could not shut out the sounds. Rachel bent over, muffling
her moans of pain with the end of her apron. As the spasm passed, she sank down on her chair close to the range.

‘Oh, Dolly,’ she burst out, her voice high and out of control. She seemed to forget they could hear every word. ‘What am I going to do? What if this one’s not all right?
If I have another one like Tommy, that’ll be the end of it. Danny’ll go, I know he will. He’ll just go off and leave us and then what’ll I do?’

Melly felt the words like the blows of a stick. What was Mom on about? Dad, leave them? He had left them once before for a time, she didn’t know how long and she didn’t know why. But
he had come back. It felt long ago, like a dream that she had forgotten until now.

She looked at Tommy. He was sitting in his special chair, his head slightly to one side, his body wavering slightly as it always did, eyes wide, looking across at Mom. Had he heard? Of course he
had heard. Tommy heard everything, understood everything, no matter what anyone else might think.

‘Oh, love,’ Dolly was saying, leaning over Rachel with her arm round her shoulders. ‘Shh.’ She glanced back at Tommy for a second, then lowered her voice.
‘Don’t be daft. Why should it happen again? You had Kev all right, dain’t you?’

‘Well, why did it happen with Tommy?’ Melly heard her mother say in a forced whisper. ‘I still don’t know. Was it something I did? Oh, God –’ She broke off
and pushed herself up to bend over the chair. ‘Here it comes again.’

‘Come on, bab – don’t get all upset or you’ll make it worse for yourself,’ Dolly said, once the pains had receded again. Melly could hear a strain in her voice. She
could tell that Dolly did not really know what to say either.

‘See, Tommy,’ Melly said to him desperately, trying to distract him from Mom’s terrible words. ‘Soon we’ll have a new babby and you can play with him and we can
show Cissy when she comes over . . .’

Cissy, Rachel’s baby sister, was only two years older than Melly. They always called themselves cousins even though Cissy was really Melly’s aunt.

‘Why don’t we get you upstairs?’ Dolly was saying to Rachel. ‘Let’s get you sorted out. The midwife’ll be here soon. Reggie went for her a while ago
now.’ She glanced round at the children. ‘We can’t send them to play out, Rach – they’ll flaming drown out there today! All right, bab –’ She gave Melly a
reassuring smile. ‘That’s a girl – you look after your brothers. And you be a good girl, Donna.’