Tuppence To Spend (9 page)

‘I sent Sammy up the street for some rations but all he could get was a bit of scrag-end to make a stew with. Don’t go on at him, Dan. There’s just nothing in the shops.’

‘Well, there bloody ought to be. We got ration books now, haven’t we? It’s all supposed to be shared out fair between everyone. There ought to be meat up the butcher’s, and groceries and everything. If our Sam doesn’t come back with something decent tomorrow I’ll go up there myself and give that bugger Alf Hines what for. He’s taking advantage, that’s what it is. Knows you’re not the ticket and he just palms all the old rubbish off on the nipper.’

‘I don’t think he does …’ Nora began, but she was too weary to continue the argument. Dan wouldn’t listen anyway. He’d gone out to the scullery to look at the stew, bubbling on the stove. At least she’d managed to put that together, with a few carrots and some swede and potatoes. Dan ought to know how difficult it was to get stuff now. The terrible weather meant that hardly any vegetables could be brought from the farms, even if they could get the stuff out of the ground, and there wasn’t much arriving at the docks either. Even if there hadn’t been any rationing, even if there hadn’t been a war at all, it would still be difficult and she just felt too ill to go up the street herself.

Nora was beginning to think there was something really wrong with her. It wasn’t just that she was so tired all the time – there’d been blood on her pillow that morning, although she hadn’t cut herself, and when she changed her vest she’d noticed bruises on her body that she couldn’t remember getting. I must have walked into the corner of the table, she thought, looking at the mauve stain on her thigh, but how could I have done that without realising it? And where did I get that other bruise, on my chest?

‘Where’s our Gordon?’ she asked as Dan brought the saucepan in and set it on the table. Sammy had laid it before going upstairs, where he always went when Dan was due home. ‘Didn’t he ought to have come in with you?’

‘Stopped on to do some overtime.’ Dan peered into the saucepan. The stew smelled all right but looked thin and watery, and the meat was gristly and full of bone. ‘Blimey,
this looks like bloody dishwater. Can’t you do no better than that, Nora?’

‘I’m sorry, love.’ Her eyes filled with tears. It had taken all her strength to scrub the carrots and chop up the swede. She’d cut her finger doing it too, and the blood had run for ages before it had stopped, making her feel really faint so that she’d had to sit down. ‘I’d run out of browning for the gravy and Mr Sims didn’t have no more. It’ll taste all right.’

‘It’d better.’ He went to the doorway at the foot of the staircase and yelled loudly enough for the Vickerses, next door, to hear him. ‘Sammy! Come down here, your supper’s on the table. I dunno what that boy does with himself up there,’ he grumbled, returning to the table. ‘He ought to be down here, giving you a bit of company and a hand round the house.’

Nora wanted to tell him that Sammy did all he could manage and stayed with her almost until they heard Dan’s key in the lock, but he would know then that the boy only scurried upstairs to keep out of his father’s way and he’d be more annoyed than ever. Rows and arguments were more than Nora could cope with.

Sammy came slowly down the stairs and slid into the room. He looked at his father with anxious blue eyes and slipped into his chair at the table.

‘Well?’ Dan demanded. ‘Got nothing to say for yourself, then? Cat got your tongue?’

Sammy shook his head, licked his lips and whispered. ‘Hullo, Dad.’

‘That’s a bit better. Now eat your stew, your mum’s been busy all day making that.’

He sat down at the head of the table and Nora heaved herself out of her chair and sat opposite him. She ladled stew out of the saucepan and the meat and vegetables lay on the plates in a greyish puddle. Dan attacked his straight
away. Sammy picked out the fat and laid it on the edge of his plate.

‘Now what’s the matter with that?’ his father demanded. ‘That’s good meat, that is. Build you up. No wonder you’re such a miserable little runt if you won’t eat your dinner. Come on, get it down you.’

Sammy looked at the fat and felt tears come to his eyes. ‘I can’t chew it.’

‘Can’t chew it? Of course you can chew it! Got teeth, haven’t you? They oughter be sharper than mine, being so new. Get it down you and don’t answer back.’

Sammy put a piece into his mouth. It felt like a lump of rubber. He turned it over and over in his mouth, but could make no impression.

Dan stared at him. ‘Come on then, swallow. You must have chewed it enough now.’

‘I
can’t
.’

Dan leaned across the table, his black brows drawn heavily together. He fixed his eyes on Sammy’s face.

‘I
said
, swallow.’

Sammy gazed at his father. He made a huge effort and gulped the lump of rubbery fat down. It stuck in his throat and he began to choke.

‘Oh, my Gawd!’ Exasperated, Dan reached across and thumped his son hard between the shoulder blades. The fat shot out and Sammy, scarlet-faced, began to heave and retch. His father jerked him out of his seat and pushed him towards the door.

‘There’s no need to make yourself sick. You’re just playing on it. Get outside, and when you’ve finished you’d better get back upstairs. No –’ he changed his mind ‘– come back in here and finish your supper. Then you can do a bit of clearing up, help your mother.’

‘Dan, don’t—’ Nora began, but her husband cut her off with a brusque movement of his hand.

‘Keep out of this, Nora. Someone’s got to discipline the
boy. Seems to me he’s doing bugger-all to help you. Place is like a flipping dump. He might as well have been evacuated like the others.’

‘You know I didn’t want him to go.’

‘You said you wanted him at home to help you. Well, he’s not doing much of that, far as I can see.’ Dan sat down again and attacked his meal once more. ‘You not eating that?’

Nora was pushing her food half-heartedly around her plate. ‘I dunno, I just don’t feel very hungry. You have it, Dan, you’ve been working hard.’

‘Too bloody true.’ He wiped his plate clean with a lump of bread and took hers. ‘I’ll see that boy does the washing-up and then I’ll go up the pub for a pint.’

He looked at Sammy as the boy sidled back into the room. ‘And you needn’t look as if you’re frightened to come in. Sit down and get on with your supper, it’s getting cold.’

Sammy looked despairingly at his plate. The thin gravy had congealed and when he pushed the surface with his fork it wrinkled. Large tears dripped on to it and he looked imploringly at his mother.

‘It’s all right, Sammy,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to eat it. I know you don’t like the fat—’

‘
Doesn’t like it
!’ Dan roared, thumping the table with his fist. ‘What the bleeding hell has
that
got to do with it? It’s food, innit? It’s all we bloody got. We got to eat it whether we like it or not.’ He glared at his son. ‘Don’t you know there’s a bleeding war on?’

‘Dan, don’t. He’s only eight.’

‘He’s old enough to do as he’s told. I had to eat what I was given when I was his age and think myself lucky to get it, never mind
liking
it. He don’t know he’s born, none of ’em do.’ Dan pushed his plate away and leaned close to his son again. ‘Listen, I’ve been working hard to get the money to buy you food and you’ll bloody well eat it, see? I’m not
seeing good food go to waste. Now, get on with it and no more argument.’

Slowly, Sammy began to fork up the cold vegetables. Each mouthful made him want to retch again, but he dared not anger his father any more. He forced the food down, gulping the fat whole and wishing he dared pass it down to Tibby, and after a long time the plate was almost empty.

His mother took it away. ‘That’s enough. He’s eaten nearly all of it, Dan. I did give him a big helping.’

Dan glowered but said no more. Nora nodded at Sammy. ‘All right. You can get down now.’

Sammy slipped out of his chair and hesitated, looking at his mother.

‘Clear the table, there’s a good boy,’ she said. ‘Then you can help me wash up and afterwards you can sit by the fire and listen to the wireless for a bit.’ She watched as Sammy gathered the plates together and took them out to the scullery, then she turned back to her husband. ‘He shouldn’t have had to eat all that, Dan. It’s cruel, making him.’

‘Cruel? I’m not cruel! I’m just trying to get some goodness into the boy, feed him up a bit. Can’t you see he needs it, Nora? Can’t you see he’s not growing like he should? Look at our Gordon, always been a big, strong nipper and now he’s nigh on as big as me. Trouble with Sam, you’ve always kept him tied to your apron strings, turned him into a sissy.’ He looked into the fire and added more quietly, ‘I’m not being cruel.’

Nora was too weary to argue. She lay back in her chair, wishing she didn’t feel so tired all the time. It had been going on for months now and there were other things too – the way her body ached and the funny way things got blurred sometimes, as if her sight was going. She felt sick a lot of the time, too, and she didn’t blame Sammy for not wanting his meal. It really wasn’t very nice, specially when it got cold.

She thought of the old days, living over the pub in Old Portsmouth. It wasn’t much of a place and they got all the rougher sailors and dock workers down there, but somehow, even in the worst times, during the Depression of the Thirties, her dad had managed to find something to laugh at. ‘If we can’t get the beer to sell, Eth,’ he’d say to his wife, ‘the customers can’t run up a big slate, can they!’ Not that he allowed many of them to run a slate anyway. You couldn’t, in a place like Old Pompey.

‘It’s not that I want to keep on at the boy,’ Dan said suddenly. ‘I just want to see him grow a bit and get a bit more spark about him. He’s going to be a
man
, Nora, and he’s going to have to do a tough job, like me and Gordon. It won’t do him no good to let him grow up frightened of his own shadow.’

It’s his father’s shadow he’s frightened of, Nora thought. She looked at Dan’s dark face and remembered what he’d been like as a boy, always been full of laughter and mischief. They’d grown up together in the streets around Spice Island, the bit of Old Portsmouth between the Camber and the entrance to the harbour where cargoes had come from all over the world, and spent hours scavenging round the beach at low tide to pick up driftwood or any other bits of flotsam and jetsam that came in. Some of it was only fit to be used as firewood but now and then you’d come across something that could be cleaned up and taken to the junk shop or the rag and bone man to sell for a few pence. She remembered Dan finding a really good belt once, that he’d got eightpence for. He’d shared it with her and she’d bought a bag of bacon cuttings, an onion and twopenn’orth of suet and taken it all home to her mother, and that night they’d had a meal she’d provided all herself.

She and Dan had always been together. Childhood sweethearts, they’d been called. But then he’d gone off to fight in the Great War and when he came home he was different. Quiet a lot of the time, but with a sudden,
frightening temper she never remembered from before. They’d got married and she found that he had nightmares too, horrible ones that woke him up screaming, but he would never tell her what they were about. She just had to hold him in her arms until the shuddering stopped and the sweat gradually cooled.

Over the years the nightmares had grown less frequent but the temper had remained and you never knew quite what would set him off. Since there’d been all this talk of war he’d got worse and the other night he’d woken up shouting again. It was as if he was going back to those dark, secret days of the trenches.

‘Sammy’ll be all right,’ she said now. ‘He looks after me during the day, and does the shopping and goes round earning a bit of money doing errands as well. Don’t keep on at him.’

Dan turned and looked at her, and she was startled by the look in his eyes, a look of sorrow and bewilderment that reminded her of the Dan who had come home from the war to touch her heart. ‘I know, love,’ he said. ‘I know he does. But when I look at him – and when I look at you – well, I just wonder what’s going to become of us all. I mean, if this war really gets going – and I has to go away again. I’m not too old, Nora. I’m under forty still. I got in under age last time because I told ’em I was older, but lies won’t wash this time, they got all your records now. It’s not Gordon I worry about, it’s you, being poorly all the time, and our Sam, only knee-high to a grasshopper …’ He shook his head, and the anger and frustration and despair came back into his face. ‘And I can’t bloody do nothing
about
it!’ he exclaimed, thumping his fist on his knee. ‘
None
of us can do nothing about it. We’re just – just caught up in it all, like rats in a bloody trap!’

Nora could find nothing to say. For a moment, she had been allowed a brief glimpse into her husband’s frightened heart, but almost as soon as she saw it, the shutter came
down and she was faced with his familiar anger again, and she understood that he would rather feel angry than frightened. Anger kept him in the present; fear took him back to the horrors he had known twenty years ago, horrors he could not bear to face again.

Sammy finished the washing-up and came uncertainly back into the room, and Dan put on his jacket and went off to the pub. Sammy sat down on the little wooden stool at her knee and rested his head against her.

‘I’m sorry, Mum.’

‘You done nothing wrong, love,’ she said, laying her hand on his hair. ‘You been a good boy. I know you can’t eat the fat.’

‘I’ll try and get sausages tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Mr Hines said there might be some, if I got there early enough.’

Nora looked at him. Dan was right, she thought, he did look thin and small for his age, and he wasn’t very clean either. He looked as if no one cared. But I do care, she thought, I do, it’s just that I’m so tired. Perhaps I’m being selfish keeping him home when he could be out in the country, getting good food and fresh air.

‘Would you rather go away with the other kiddies?’ she asked. ‘Would you rather be out at Bridge End? I dare say you could still go, if you wanted.’