Street Kid (9 page)

I was aching to tell them,
I bought the sweets for the others. I never ate a single one. I only wanted a friend.

From that moment on, the teachers and pupils at Duke Street never let me forget that I was a thief. It was as if an indelible brand had been burned into my forehead. Weeks later, when my form teacher asked for volunteers to collect
the dinner money, I was careful not to raise my hand but she picked on me all the same, saying, ‘I’m glad that you didn’t offer, Judith. We certainly wouldn’t be able to trust you with money after what you did, would we children?’

Strangely enough, the first friend I had in Wood Street came via my father – the very person who’d made sure I was always friendless. Dad came home after work one day, a couple of months after I’d been sent to Hulme, and peeping out of his pocket was a little puppy that one of his workmates had given him. He called her Gyp.

Gyp became the friend I’d been yearning for. Each morning, when I got up at first light, she would be waiting for me downstairs, wagging her tail in welcome. Suddenly, my chores didn’t seem half as miserable with this alert little pup at my side. She was remarkably patient with me when I wanted to play doctors and nurses, and even let me dress her up in my clothes. She quickly took over from Susie as my number one confidante, and when I got back from school, and had finished my afternoon chores, I’d lie on my bed telling her about my day. She’d sit with her paw on my knee and watch me with bright, intelligent eyes.

Once, when my dad lifted his arm to hit me, Gyp jumped up and grabbed his sleeve, growling menacingly at him. She was a brave little dog and the best thing that had ever happened to me.

It was through Gyp that I met Edna Hillyard. The dogs in our neighbourhood were all allowed to roam the streets during the day. No one bothered about collars or leads. When I left for school, Gyp stayed in Wood Street, playing with other dogs and scavenging for scraps. I used to wish I could hang around with her instead of having to go to school.

I used to dash home in the afternoons, desperate to play with Gyp. When she ran up to greet me I’d squat down and put my arms around her neck and she’d lick my face. It was on one of these afternoons that I met Edna.

Edna lived two doors up from us, the youngest child in a large, ramshackle family. On the day we first spoke to each other, she was sitting on the step with her dog eating a hunk of bread. I walked over to Gyp, who was sniffing around Edna’s large, friendly-looking mutt. The dog looked twice the weight of the girl, who was an undernourished scrap of a thing with thin, pale hair. She had a sharp little elfin face and must have been a year or two younger than me.

‘What’s your name?’

Edna eyed me with bright eyes, like an inquisitive little robin. I didn’t answer her at first, too nervous to open my mouth. My back felt all prickly – I was sure that a hundred eyes were watching me. In my imaginings, Freda’s spies were always everywhere.

‘Judy.’ I barely moved my lips.

‘Mine’s Edna,’ the girl said. ‘Why can’t you play out?’

‘Not allowed.’

‘Why not?’ Edna wasn’t giving up.

‘Dunno.’ Part of me was wanting to continue with our conversation – what there was of it – but I simply didn’t dare. And so I called Gyp and went home.

A few days later, I was walking down the alley next to our house with Gyp when I saw Edna standing on her own, scuffing the ground with a tatty plimsol. She looked bored. Gyp ran over to her dog and began to sniff his bottom.

‘Bonzo and Gyp are best friends,’ Edna said. ‘Do you want to come and play?’

‘Someone’ll see us.’

‘Not if we go to Lloyd Street.’ Edna said. ‘Come on.’

I followed her and once we were a few streets away, in the road that skirted her school, I finally relaxed.

‘Can you do handstands?’ Edna asked, immediately flipping upside down. Her arms looked as though they’d be too spindly to carry her weight and she didn’t do a great job of it. I was ace at handstands – naturally bendy and totally fearless. If you’ve been bashed and beaten all your life I guess you don’t feel fear like other kids.

Edna gave up doing handstands and watched me for a bit, looking impressed. Then she walked along the low wall that skirted the pavement, her arms stretched out on either side to help her balance.

‘Can you play hopscotch?’ I asked Edna.

‘Course!’

‘Come on, let’s look for a bit of slate.’ In those days, you could always find broken roof slates amongst the general rubble of our streets and alleys. Kids didn’t dare nick the teachers’ chalk, so slate was all they had to mark out the hopscotch grid.

We found some bits of slate and I drew the numbers and squares on the ground. We then spent a happy half hour, throwing the piece of slate and hopping and jumping from one square to the next. I don’t know if Edna sensed how momentous this was for me. She wouldn’t have known that I’d always had to play on my own.

Edna and I played together a lot after that and she quickly became a huge part of my life. Every morning, on waking, Edna was the first thing I thought about, and she was the last thing in my mind before going to sleep. I used to get my afternoon chores done in double-quick time so that I could go and play hopscotch with her.

Edna and I talked a lot too. I wasn’t used to talking like a child about a child’s things, and it was exhilarating. I loved to hear about her school and what she’d been doing that day. Later, in my room, I’d weave fantasies around Lord Street School. It became a sort of Mallory Towers in my mind, a place of high jinks and undying friendships.

With ten mouths to feed, there wasn’t much to go around at Edna’s. Despite their problems, however, Edna’s mother was always welcoming. Mrs Hillyard was a big bruiser of a woman with raggedy hair and very large arms. The first time that Edna took me into her house I was shocked that things were so basic. In the Hillyards’ front room there was just one big table, covered with newspaper instead of a cloth. Other than a bench, there was no other furniture in the room at all. I think Mr Hillyard spent too much of his wages at the pub. Lying in bed at night, I used to hear him singing the Johnnie Ray song ‘Just Walking in the Rain’, on his way home after closing time. Once, in the yellow light of the gas lamp, I watched him from my window. He was weaving his way up the street in the smoggy air, a bleary-faced wafer of a man. I felt there was something a little bit tragic about him.

Edna was always hungry. When I saw her sitting on the step with the hunk of bread she’d been given for her tea I worried that her bare knees looked terribly bony and bluish. Once, when we went into Mrs Allen’s corner shop, I saw Edna nick two Walls sausages from the window and stuff them under her jumper. As soon as we got outside, she hungrily crammed them raw into her mouth.

I quickly became obsessed with finding warm food for Edna. All I needed to do was to come up with a plan to get hold of some. I decided that I wanted to buy her a bag of
chips from the chippy at the end of the road. The hard thing was working out how. There was no way I’d be venturing near Freda’s purse again.

I knew that if you took enough newspapers to the fish and chip shop they’d give you a bag of chips, because they needed the papers to wrap the food in. I soon came up with a plan to get a stack. There were two papers that gave the results of all the football matches, the football pinks and the football greens. The pinks were delivered at four or five every Saturday afternoon.

I walked along the streets in the wake of the paperboy, nicking the papers from the doorsteps. At the fish and chip shop, the lady behind the counter didn’t seem to notice or care that I was handing her a stack of brand-new football pinks. She gave me a big bag of chips and some scraps – the batter bits – for free. I couldn’t wait to give them to Edna. I would have run down the street but was nervous of dropping the bag.

‘Mrs Hillyard, is Edna in?’ I stood on the step, holding the bag of chips behind my back

‘Edna!’ Mrs Hillyard shouted up the stairs. ‘Judy’s here to see you.’

Edna ran down the stairs, two at a time, and came outside, closing the door behind her.

I held out the bag of chips and scraps.

‘Cor, how did you get those?’ Edna’s eyes were on stalks.

‘I nicked the football pinks, but don’t tell anyone,’ I replied. ‘They’re for you. I’m full already.’

I watched with enormous satisfaction as Edna sat on the step and got stuck into the chips. When she’d finished she showed me her tummy. I’d seen a picture in a book at school of a snake that had just eaten a frog and it looked just like that.

Edna didn’t need to say thank you. Just seeing her eat was enough for me. But it was lovely when she gave me a big, gap-toothed grin all the same.

The next Saturday morning, I was sitting on the step with Edna laughing at Gyp and Bonzo chasing each others’ heels and barking. Dad and Freda were both out and I knew they wouldn’t be back until later. Edna had been waiting for the past hour or more for her brother, Bill, to arrive. She wanted to be the first to greet him, so we were posted there as look-outs.

‘Me mam says I’ve got to go into hospital,’ Edna said.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ I asked, remembering my weeks spent tied to the bars of the cot at Hope Hospital.

‘Got something wrong with my tummy,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Do you get jelly and custard in hospital?’

‘Yeah. Every day,’ I said reassuringly, knowing that food was top of the agenda for Edna. ‘When are you going?’

‘Dunno. Next week, I think.’

We sat for a moment in silence. Then Bonzo tore himself away from Gyp and ran off down the street barking, his tail waving madly. Edna jumped up.

‘Bill!’ she cried. ‘It’s him. He’s here!’ Edna tore off after Bonzo and I followed at a more hesitant pace, feeling a bit shy. Edna had told me all about her glamourous brother Bill, who was a soldier in the army.

Bill didn’t disappoint. He was dressed in his khakis and cap and had an almost American swagger, with clean-cut looks to match. He was obviously delighted to see Edna and scooped her up, swinging her round in a circle.

‘Hello there, littl’un!’ Bill put her down and turned to me. ‘Who’s your friend?’

‘This is Judy,’ Edna said. ‘She lives in the house at the end.’

‘Well, you can share this with Judy, then,’ Bill said, holding out a banana. We’d never seen a banana before. Edna held it tentatively, having no idea what to do with it.

‘How do you eat it?’ she asked Bill.

‘Here, like this,’ he said, laughing, and peeled back the skin in strips. ‘Go on, have a bite.’

Edna and I then took a little bite each. I thought the banana tasted horrid and felt slimy. Since my two rice pudding episodes I never could eat anything slimy.

‘Ugh!’ said Edna, handing the banana back to Bill, who polished it off.

‘Better go see the old ma and pa,’ Bill then said. ‘Come on, Eddie. Nice meeting you, Judy.’

I went back to our house then and lay a while on my bed. I added Bill to my list of fantasy heroes and made up a Tommies and Jerries adventure, with Bill in the starring role.

I didn’t see Edna again before she went to hospital, and life felt pretty flat when she’d gone. I’d got used to seeing her most days. I kept thinking of her on her own in a ward with no one to play with and wondered what I could do to show I was thinking of her. I decided to give her one of my books, not a library book, but one I’d been given by one of my dad’s Spiritualist circle. The book was one of my favourites,
What Katy Did,
and I reckoned that Edna would love it too. It seemed an especially appropriate story. Katy gets crippled after a fall and can’t run around with her friends like before. Now Edna was stuck in hospital she might like to imagine she was Katy.

I took the book round to Mrs Hillyard and asked her to give it to Edna the next time she went to the hospital.
Edna’s mum looked kindly at me. I’d come to realize over the past few weeks that this big-boned, dour woman had a very warm heart.

‘That’s kind of you, Judy,’ she said, smiling. I only realized then where Edna got her gap-toothed grin, as I’d never seen her Mum smiling before. I suppose it was a tough life looking after ten kids with hardly two pennies to rub together.

‘How long before she comes out, Mrs Hillyard?’ I asked.

‘Oh, a little while yet, probably another couple of weeks,’ she told me. ‘But she’ll be tickled you lent her the book, she really will.’

I think that becoming fond of Edna had made me open out, like a moth from its cocoon, in the weeks I’d got to know her. I was happier and more relaxed. I was also less on my guard.

Evelyn, one of Edna’s sisters, knocked at our door a few days later. When Freda opened it, she was instantly tense, her mouth set in a hard line.

‘Yes? What are you doing here?’

‘Me mam asked me to bring this back to Judy,’ Evelyn said. ‘She said to be sure and tell her that Edna really liked it.’

Freda, eyes sparking with fury, snatched the book from Evelyn and slammed the door in her face.

‘Judy!’

I knew it was bad from her tone. I had the crazy idea of jumping from my window to escape but went downstairs instead. Before I could reach the bottom of the stairs, Freda made a lunge at me and grabbed my arm. She whacked me across the face with the book then kicked me hard in the shins so that my legs buckled under me.

‘I’m going to burn them all, every bloody book of yours!’ she screamed at me. ‘You lying little runt. You’re never, ever having anything to do with that disgusting, filthy family again, you hear that?’

Freda made me go round then and there to tell Mrs Hillyard that I wasn’t allowed to play with Edna any more. I felt ashamed and desperate as I stood on the doorstep delivering the message. Edna’s mum wasn’t angry – in fact, she looked sorry for me – but I sensed that she was furious at Freda for being a stuck-up cow, thinking her daughter was too good to mix with their family.

Mrs Hillyard saw my face had a welt across it from where the book had cut into it. ‘Are you alright, lovey?’ she asked me. But I couldn’t answer her and ran back home, where there was much more trouble to come.