ANNE BENNETT

Keep the Home Fires Burning

This book is dedicated to my youngest and

second granddaughter, Catrin Louise, who was

born on 28th July 2010 and who has already

given us all great joy.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

AUTHOR’S NOTE

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

ONE

‘I was speaking to Fred Shipley after Mass this morning, Bill Whittaker said as the family sat around the table that early April morning, eating their large breakfast. ‘You know, from a few doors up?’

His wife, Marion, nodded. ‘I know him. Ada’s husband. They have a son in the navy.’

‘So he was saying. He claims they’re getting all the ships into tiptop condition and more are being commissioned. Not that they tell the men much, but apparently they’re recruiting nineteen to the dozen, only it’s all hush-hush at the moment.’

‘Why?’

‘At a guess I’d say that they don’t want to start a national panic. Now, you’re not to fret about this, though maybe it is better to be semi-prepared, but I am beginning to wonder if Chamberlain was wilier than we gave him credit for when he came back from Munich waving that piece of paper last September, declaring that there’d be “Peace for our time”.’

‘In what way?’

‘Well, I’m wondering if all that talk of appeasement was just a ploy so that we could get ourselves on a war footing should the need arise. I mean, can you see a man like Hitler being satisfied with just Austria and Czechoslovakia? And just at the moment he has plenty on his side, with the Fascist Franco winning the war in Spain, and Mussolini in charge in Italy. And Stalin seems to be another brutal dictator.’

Marion let her eyes settle on her family grouped around the table listening to her husband. Her elder three children looked very like her, with their hazel eyes and light brown hair, her handsome elder son, Richard, tall for fifteen. He had been apprenticed in the brass foundry, where his father worked, for almost a year now, Sarah, her beautiful eldest daughter, would be fifteen in October, and her mischievous second son, Tony, was just turned nine and sometimes one body’s work to watch. The identical twins, Miriam, who was known as Missie, and Magda, looked the spit of their father with their dark eyes and dark hair, and would be seven in June.

Suddenly Bill’s words seemed to threaten all Marion held dear, and she shuddered as she said, ‘Europe doesn’t seem to be a very safe place at the moment.’

‘It isn’t,’ Bill answered grimly.

‘But, Bill,’ Marion’s eyes looked large in her pale face, ‘surely no one wants war, certainly not after the last lot.’

‘No sane person wants war at any time,’ Bill said. ‘But Hitler isn’t sane, is he? You remember that rampage against the Jews that we heard about on the wireless last November? Would any sane man authorise that?’

‘Oh, I remember it well.’ And without thinking of the children listening, Marion went on, ‘The night we heard about it was a filthy one too, cold and windy with rain lashing down, and I thought, what if it had been us thrown out on a night like that, like those poor Jews were?’

Magda’s eyes were like saucers. ‘So why was Jews thrown out then?’ she asked.

Tony suppressed a sigh, but he could cheerfully have murdered Magda. She never would learn that once adults realised you were taking an interest in what they are saying, they either shut up or send you away.

Marion bit her lip and looked straight across at Bill. He mopped the last of the egg yolk up with his bread before he shrugged and said, ‘These are strange times. Maybe it is better that they know what happened.’

Marion really thought Tony and the twins too young to know the full horrors of that night, yet they looked the most interested, but it was Sarah who said, ‘Please tell us the rest? You can’t leave it there.’

‘All right,’ Marion said. ‘The people attacked and thrown out of their homes that night were Jews in cities and towns all over Germany. Even the broadcaster on the BBC was shocked at the level and scale of violence. Storm troopers, members of the SS, and Hitler Youth beat and murdered even women and children.’

‘Yes,’ said Bill, accepting another cup of tea from Marion. ‘It went on for three days in some places. One observer claimed the sky had turned red with the number of synagogues that were alight, in case the persecuted Jews tried to take refuge there, and the Germans called it “The Night of Broken Glass”.’

‘But why?’ Richard asked.

Bill sighed. ‘Many German Jews had been rounded up and dumped on the Polish border, each with all they could carry in one suitcase. One young Jewish boy living in Paris heard that his own family had been evicted in that way and he bought a gun and killed a German Embassy official. This was the German response.’

‘Gosh,’ Richard said. ‘I don’t suppose he ever thought the Germans would react like they did.’

‘No,’ Bill agreed, ‘I don’t suppose he did.’

‘What happened to the Jewish people when it was all over?’ Sarah asked.

Bill shrugged. ‘Many died, some were arrested, others just disappeared, and it was said that a lot committed suicide ? in despair, I would imagine ? and who in God’s name could blame them?’

‘Did anything happen to Germany for doing such awful things?’

‘Most of the other countries said it was dreadful and barbaric, and America did recall their ambassador, but that was all.’

‘It was a terrible thing to do,’ Sarah said.

‘Yes,’ Marion said heavily. Then: ‘And we could talk about it till the cows come home and it won’t change a thing. Meanwhile, if you’ve finished, Bill, I could do with clearing away because I need to get the dinner on. Sarah, will you give me a hand?’

Sarah smiled to herself as she collected plates, for it wasn’t a question. She was the eldest girl and so it was her lot to help her mother. She didn’t really mind because her mother was a very good cook and she learned a lot by watching her.

As they rose from the table Bill saw Richard’s eyes on him and knew he would have liked to talk some more. However, he knew when Clara Murray, Marion’s mother, came to tea, as she and Eddie, Marion’s father, did every Sunday. She would likely have an opinion on the world’s unrest. She did most weeks ? and her views, on any subject, were delivered in tones that would brook no argument.

Bill disliked her intensely and, he knew, so did the children, so every Sunday afternoon, just after one of Marion’s succulent dinners, unless it was teeming from the heavens, he tried to keep Tony and the twins away from their grandmother for as long as possible.

A light breeze scudded the clouds across the blue sky where a pale yellow sun was trying to shine as Bill, Tony and the twins stepped out into Albert Road that afternoon.

‘Well, where do you want to go?’ Bill asked.

The children looked at one another. They knew if they turned right and went to the bottom of the street then they would be at Aston Park, which they liked well enough, but if they turned down Sutton Street and into Rocky Lane they would come to the Cut, which was what Brummies called the canal. Their father had told them once that Birmingham had more canals that Venice, and whether it had or not, the children loved to see the brightly painted barges decorated with elephants and castles, and so they said as one, ‘The Cut.’

‘Right you are then.’ Bill strode down the road holding a twin by each hand, while Tony ran ahead like a young colt. The sun peeping out from beneath the clouds made even the water in the mud-slicked canal sparkle and the paintwork on the boats and barges gleamed. The Whittakers wandered along the towpath towards Salford Bridge. These days the barges had small motors to drive them, but Bill said when he was a boy they had been horse drawn: ‘Big solid horses with shaggy feet.’

‘Like the one the coalman has?’ Magda asked.

‘The very same. They’re called shire horses and are built for strength and stamina, not speed. Now, when they would come to a tunnel, the men and big boys would have to unshackle the horse and walk the barge through with their feet. It was called “legging it”.’

‘And I suppose the horses had to go over the top?’ said Tony.

‘That’s right. A younger boy or a woman or girl would lead it over to meet up with the barge on the other side. It was a grand sight to see, but motorised barges make life much easier for them.’

‘Faster too.’

‘I don’t know if it would be that much faster, Tony. A barge isn’t allowed to go at any great speed anyway. They’re not built for it.’

‘No,’ Tony said, ‘they’re not, but I wish I’d seen the horses pulling them, anyway.’

‘And me,’ said Missie, as she gave a sudden shiver.

‘Are you cold?’ Bill asked.

‘She can’t be cold,’ Tony declared. ‘It ain’t the slightest bit nippy and them kids don’t seem to think so either.’

He was referring to the bargee boys. They were brown-skinned, often scantily dressed and barefoot, and they didn’t seem to feel the slightest chill as they leaped with agility from boat to boat or out onto the towpath to operate the locks.

Tony watched them with envy. ‘Wouldn’t that be a grand life, Dad?’ he said. ‘Just to do that all day long. I’d never get fed up of it.’

Bill smiled as he turned back along the towpath. ‘I think you would, son,’ he said. ‘It’s not that fine a life; I think a fairly hard one, for the children at least. Many of them never have the benefit of a proper education, with them moving up and down the canal the way they do.’

Tony looked at his father in amazement. ‘I wouldn’t care a whit about that,’ he maintained. ‘A life like that would suit me down to the ground.’

Bill let out a bellow of laughter. ‘I think, Tony, that you and school are not the best of friends.’

‘No,’ Tony said. ‘I hate school, if you want to know. Everyone does, don’t they?’

‘No, they don’t,’ Magda contradicted. ‘I don’t. I like school. Don’t you, Missie?’

Missie nodded as Tony said disparagingly, ‘That’s because you’re still in the infants. You wait till you’re in the juniors in September. You do summat wrong, or don’t do your work right or quick enough, and they hit you with a big cane, or bring the ruler down on your knuckles.’

‘How many girls does that happen to?’ Bill asked with a sardonic grin.

‘Well, not that many, I suppose,’ Tony had to admit. ‘They seem to have it in for boys.’

‘That’s because boys are always playing up,’ Magda said.

‘And you don’t, Miss Goody Two-Shoes?’

‘No,’ Magda said. ‘I don’t like being yelled at, and really the only person who seems to do that all the time ? to me anyroad ? is Grandma Murray.’

‘Don’t take that personally,’ Bill said. ‘She seems to have it in for a lot of people.’

‘But it’s not fair,’ Magda said. ‘The one she should tell off more is Tony, but he always gets away with it, just ‘cos he’s a boy.’

‘Can’t help that, can I?’ Tony said with a cheeky grin, and Bill had to compress his lips to stop himself from smiling.

‘Come on, stop bickering,’ he said, ‘it’s time to head home. If we’re late we’ll all be in for the high jump.’

Magda gave a grimace in her sister’s direction because the twins knew exactly how it would be when they got home. As far back as they could remember, their grandparents had come to tea on Sunday. It was always served in the parlour, the room their mother set such store by, like she did about the piano. Sarah had told Magda and Missie their father thought the piano a waste of money, for no one had ever learned to play it, but their mother had wanted the piano because she said none of their neighbours had anything so fine.

‘Why does that matter?’ Magda had asked.

Sarah shrugged. ‘I don’t know why,’ she’d admitted. ‘It just does.’

It was very confusing to both girls but, as Missie said, grown-ups often did odd things, and Magda had to agree.

All the furniture in the parlour, like the piano, was big, dark and gloomy. On Sundays it all had to be moved about to accommodate everyone. Six days a week, the big mahogany table would be set in the bay window behind madras net curtains. It would be covered with a dark red chenille cloth, with an aspidistra in a decorated pot in the centre of it. Either side of the table were two straight-backed dining chairs with padded seats, and two more dining chairs stood either side of the matching sideboard.

The picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, in which Jesus held one hand to his heart dripping with blood in his open chest ? a picture that always made Magda feel queasy ? hung on the wall above the fireplace. That was surrounded by marble tiles and protected by a brass fender. In front of it sat the dreaded horsehair sofa.

However, on Sunday afternoon, the aspidistra would be placed on the sideboard and the chenille cloth changed for one of Nottingham lace. In order that the table could be pulled out with the four padded chairs round it and two wooden ones brought out from the kitchen for Sarah and Richard, the horsehair sofa would be swung in front of the piano. And every Sunday the twins had to sit on it in silence and wait for the adults to finish eating before they could have anything, because their grandmother said it would put manners on them.

It was just like that when they went in that day. Marion and Sarah were carrying things to the table in the parlour where the children’s grandparents were already sitting, but Tony was nowhere to be seen. He had been with them as they walked back home and when they went in through the back gate, but between there and the back door he sort of melted away and Magda knew he had gone over the wall again. So did Bill, and he couldn’t blame the boy, nor had he any intention of going after him. As soon as he had started doing this, a year or so ago, Marion had said that he should discipline him. ‘For what?’ Bill had said angrily. ‘For refusing to sit still and silent for as long as it takes us to eat our tea on a Sunday, and all because that’s what your mother wants? It’s bad enough for the girls but Tony would never be constrained that way and you know it. It would be more trouble than it’s worth.’

Marion knew that Bill spoke the truth and she would spend the whole of the meal telling Tony off, so she had said nothing more. Every week Tony got away with it, as far as Missie and Magda were concerned.

‘No Tony again, I see,’ Grandma Murray remarked as the girls settled themselves on the sofa. ‘Ah, well, boys will be boys.’

Grandma Murray was fond of sayings. One she usually directed at Magda was, ‘Little girls should be seen and not heard.’ Magda often wondered if there had been a similar one she attached to grown men because Granddad Murray never seemed to say much more than please and thank you at the table where his wife held sway, and even her father was less talkative at Sunday tea.

‘Magda, if I have to tell you again about keeping those legs still I might be forced to administer a sharp smack across them,’ her grandmother suddenly snapped, and Magda realised that they were waggling again, just as if they had a mind of their own. She fought to gain control over her wayward legs because she had felt the power of her grandmother’s slaps before.

She heard her father’s sharp intake of breath clearly and saw his lips pursed together and knew he was vexed. If her grandmother were really to smack her then it would probably result in a row, as it had done in the past, and that was worse than any smack.

She knew her father didn’t like the fact they had to sit there every Sunday he’d said to Marion angrily and watch the adults devouring all the dainty sandwiches, crisp pastries and feather-light sponge cakes that Mommy had spent hours preparing, because she’d heard him arguing with her mother about it. ‘It’s unfair to them,’ Magda had heard him protest angrily after their grandparent had gone home. ‘They’re only children and its ridiculous to have them sitting there each Sunday like a pair of bloody bookends.’

Bill Whittaker, however, knew only the half of it because, as the adults ate, the horsehair pushed through the fabric of that sofa and through the twins’ clothes to attack their legs and buttocks like thousands of sharp needles. That was why Magda swung her legs and shuffled about, to try to ease the torment that Missie seemed better able to bear.

Missie was always neater and tidier than Magda was as well, as her mother and grandmother were always reminding her. She stole a look at her twin sister. There she was, sitting as if she were made of stone, with her pristine Sunday clothes still neat and tidy, and her dark ringlets shining in the sunlight.

Magda knew her hair wouldn’t look like Missie’s. Each weekday, the two of them had their hair in plaits because of the risk of nits at school, and Magda would marvel that Missie’s plaits never came unravelled and she never lost her hair ribbons. Magda’s kirbi grips, too, seemed to develop a life of their own and would fling themselves recklessly from her tangled locks, to be trodden underfoot and lost for ever.

On Saturday night, however, after their bath, their newly washed and still damp hair was twisted into rags so that they would have ringlets for Mass on Sunday morning. This worked with Missie, but sometimes Magda’s hair wouldn’t co-operate. Her mother was always saying that she couldn’t understand it. Magda couldn’t understand it either, but she knew it was no use saying so.

Marion hoped that war talk wouldn’t dominate the tea table but, surprisingly, it was her father who said in a break in the conversation, ‘They’ve recalled the Territorial Army from overseas. A bloke at work told me that his son was in France and had to come home.’

‘You never told me this,’ Clara complained.

‘I’m telling you now, aren’t I?’ Eddie said mildly. ‘Tell you summat else as well. They’ve begun a call up of men aged twenty and twenty-one.’

‘Christ! That’s it then.’

‘Good,’ Richard said. He looked at his parents as he went on, ‘What you told us this morning about The Night of Broken Glass made me feel sick. It’s hard to believe that people could be so cruel and heartless, and Hitler’s long been picking on the Jews. One of the Jewish apprentices told me that they hadn’t been able to go to school for ages before they came here.’

‘That would suit Tony then,’ Bill said.

‘Don’t think much of what they tell me would suit anyone, Dad,’ Richard said. ‘You wouldn’t credit some of the things they say happen. I thought that maybe they were exaggerating a bit. Now I’m pretty certain they’re not. They had to leave their parents behind and haven’t heard a word from them since.’

Clara had been astounded at Richard speaking so forcibly, but she recovered herself enough to say, ‘We are talking about Jews. They are little better than heathens ? and don’t forget they killed Jesus Christ.’

‘Not these particular Jews,’ Richard said with a pitying glance at his grandmother. ‘That happened nearly two thousand years ago, and they worship the same God as you. But, just as important as all that, they are people, the same as us, who feel the same hurt and pain. Someone must stop Hitler.’

‘It very much looks as if we’re getting ready to do just that,’ Bill said.

His words hung in the air and there was nothing anyone could say for a minute or two, the atmosphere was so highly charged.

In the end Marion said, ‘If we have finished shall we go into the other room and let the children sit down? I’m sure they’re more than ready for it, and we can have another cup of tea in there if you’d like one.’

Clara got up from the table, grumbling about being shooed away before she was ready, and glared so malevolently at the twins that Magda said afterwards it was as if she was begrudging them every mouthful.

Tony came sidling in as the adults were leaving the room. Magda could never understand how he timed it that well. She was so mad at the unfairness of it all and her brother’s smugness that she gave him a hefty kick under the table with her stout shoes and heard his yelp of pain. She thought it worth the reprimand because it managed to wipe the smirk off his face for once.

Despite the lovely food they had on Sunday, Magda often felt that it was the very worst day of the week, not only because of her grandmother’s visit, but also because of the clothes she had to wear for Mass. Marion often despaired of getting Magda to behave in a more ladylike way and the difference between the twins was more marked on Sunday, when they dressed in their best clothes, than on school days when they wore more serviceable clothes in navy or grey. Today they wore matching lace-trimmed dresses decorated with swirly patterns in pastel colours, with lace peeping out from the hem, and Magda knew that when they undressed for bed that night, Missie’s would be little different from when she had first put it on, while her own would resembled a limp rag.

‘It’s just as if, as soon as she’s dressed in her good clothes, muck in all its various forms flings itself onto her,’ Marion said to Bill later that same evening after the twins had gone to bed. ‘And she is so clumsy on Sundays. She seems to drop or spill nearly everything given to her and so that ends up on her dress as well. My mother always has something to say.’

‘Huh,’ Bill said. ‘That’s no surprise. She never has a good word to say about Magda anyway.’

‘She does seem to have it in for her all right,’ Marion conceded.

‘And have you thought that Magda might soil her clothes more because she is trying too hard? Her nervousness makes her more clumsy, especially with your mother around.’

‘I never thought of it like that before.’

‘Well, I’ve just been up to them,’ Bill said, ‘and their dresses are hung on the chair by the bed, so how about saying nothing more to Magda tonight, especially as your mother gave her a real roasting about the state of her clothes already?’

Marion knew that Bill had a point, so when she went to say good night to the girls she took the dresses without a word, though she knew she would have her work cut out getting Magda’s dress respectable enough to wear the following week. Magda, expecting some reprimand, was surprised when none came.

‘Have you both said your prayers?’ their mother asked, and the twins nodded solemnly.

‘We said them with Daddy,’ Missie said.

‘Well now, don’t you be talking half the night either,’ Marion said as she tucked them both in, gave them each a kiss and turned out the light but left the landing one on so that there would be a dim light for Sarah to get undressed by. ‘Remember you have school in the morning.’

Magda couldn’t believe she had got away so lightly and neither could Missie. ‘Maybe it was because Grandma told you off so much?’ Missie suggested.

‘Shouldn’t think so,’ Magda said. ‘She has told me off lots of times. Maybe Mommy just thinks I’m a hopeless case.’

‘Well, Grandma might too eventually.’

‘She won’t,’ Magda said. ‘I heard Daddy say that she’ll still be giving out when they nail her coffin down.’

Missie giggled.

‘I don’t think I was supposed to hear,’ Magda said, ‘but he really doesn’t like Grandma any more than we do.’

‘Does anyone?’ Missie answered. ‘Cept Granddad and Mommy, I suppose.’

‘Well, I don’t blame anyone for not liking her,’ Magda said.

‘Nor me,’ Missie agreed, and the two girls fell to discussing just how horrid their grandma was, so that when Sarah came to bed the two girls were wide awake.

‘You two should be asleep by now,’ she chided.

‘We were talking about Grandma Murray,’ Magda explained. ‘I think she’s a witch. She looks like a witch. Everything is long and pointed, like her bony fingers and her nose, and she’s got no proper teeth, just brown stumps.’

‘And she always wears black as well,’ Missie put in.

‘That’s because she lost all the babies and that,’ Sarah said as she took the grips out of the bun holding her hair in place. Her hair cascaded down her back and she brushed it out with the big wide brush. ‘Mom told me and Richard ages ago.’

‘Tell us then.’

‘It’s time for you to go to sleep.’

‘Oh, go on, Sarah,’ said both girls together.

‘All right,’ Sarah said, winding her hair into one plait with a speed that the twins always envied. She secured her hair with a band and padded across the room, saying as she did so, ‘But budge over then. I need to get into bed first.’

The twins moved across to make room for their sister and she turned off the light and got into bed between them. With the three of them all tucked in together and the darkness settling around them, Sarah said, ‘Mom said Grandma Murray had ten children altogether and one by one most of them died.’

‘What of?’

‘Some from diphtheria, Mom said, and others from TB.’

‘And was they all babies?’

‘No,’ Sarah said. ‘Mom said they were mostly children, only there was a baby who died in her cot when she was only little and they never found out why. Anyroad, in the end, there was only four left, Mom, Aunt Polly and the two eldest, Michael and Owen. Then Owen and Michael decided to try their luck in America, only Michael didn’t make it and when Owen wrote and told them of his death Grandma Murray pledged that she would wear black until the day she died. Mom always said that his death had affected her most, for he had been her first-born and the seventh child of hers to die, and then his body had been tipped into the Atlantic so she didn’t even have a grave to visit.’ Sarah let the twins reflect on this for a moment or two and then she said, ‘Now you’ve got to admit that that’s really sad.’

‘It is,’ Missie agreed slowly and then added, ‘And with anyone else I would feel very sorry for them, but Grandma’s hard to feel sorry for, and she can be so nasty at times.’

‘Mom always says that we have to make allowances,’ Sarah said. ‘Point is, though, I don’t see how shouting and going on like she does can help anyone cope better.’

‘Nor me,’ Magda said. ‘And I still don’t like her much.’

Missie shivered. ‘Nor me, and she scares me as well.’

‘She don’t scare me,’ Magda declared stoutly. ‘I won’t let her scare me.’ But she said it as though she were trying to convince herself.

‘Well, whatever you think about her, let’s stop talking about her now and go to sleep,’ Sarah advised. ‘Or Mom will be up to see what we are gassing about, and I’m bushed and don’t want to talk any more.’

Neither did Magda, who was suddenly feeling very sleepy, and beside her she heard Missie give a yawn and the three girls snuggled down together and were soon all fast asleep.

TWO

Afterwards, Marion thought it was from that weekend that the mood of the country changed subtly, as most people realised that the war no one really wanted was moving closer. Bill told her of the shadow factories springing up alongside legitimate ones, making military equipment and vehicles. In Birmingham the gun trade was booming. These sorts of things weren’t reported but, as Bill said, you can’t stop people talking, and word got around.

‘Personally I find it reassuring,’ he said. ‘If we do eventually go to war, then I’d like to know that the Government has been making plans for it.’

Only a week or so later Marion’s sister, Polly, popped round to announce that her two elder boys, Chris and Colm, had got jobs in Ansell’s Brewery on nearby Lichfield Road, taking the place of two boys just a little older, who had been conscripted. Polly’s sons were sixteen and fifteen, and had not had jobs since leaving school. Marion was glad that the lads were working at last and hoped that would make life easier for her sister.

Polly was married to Pat Reilly, who was a wastrel. If he had got work of any kind and looked after her sister properly, Marion might have forgiven him for taking her down when she was only sixteen, but he hadn’t done that. Polly’s house was little more than a stone’s throw from Marion’s, yet it was part of a warren of teeming back-to-back houses and as different from where Marion lived as it was possible to be.

When Polly had married Pat they had had nowhere to live but with Pat’s riotous family, but a little after Chris’s birth, a scant three months after the hasty marriage, they had acquired the house. Marion thought it little more than a slum. Entries ran down at intervals from the street to a squalid back yard, onto which Polly’s house and five others opened directly. The yard, usually crisscrossed with washing lines, housed the brew house where all the women did their washing, the tap outside it however, which froze every winter, had been the family’s only source of water until it had been piped into the houses just a few years before. Even now, Polly shared with two other families a miskin, where the ash was deposited, a dustbin, and a lavatory, which was situated at the bottom of the yard.

The house itself consisted of a scullery, which was little more than a cubbyhole at the top of the cellar steps, a small living room, a bedroom and an attic. Attached to Polly’s house was one just the same, which opened onto the street. There was a smell about the whole place: the smell of human beings packed tightly together, the stink of poverty and deprivation mingled with the vinegary tang from HP Sauce halfway up Tower Hill just behind them, and the yeasty malty odour from Ansell’s Brewery on the Lichfield Road, and you heard the constant thud of the hefty hammers from the nearby drop forge.

Marion blamed Pat for not working harder to get a job so that he could lift the family into something better. She thought Polly was far too easy on him and that she should tell him straight to steer clear of the pubs until he found employment. Polly, however, claimed he did try to get work but all the jobs he could get were casual or temporary, and that a man had to have a drink now and then.

So now Marion said to her sister, ‘No chance of Pat getting set on there, then?’

‘He did ask,’ Polly said, ‘but it was young fellows they were after. Anyroad, I don’t think it would do Pat any good to be working at a brewery. He might be tempted to taste the wares.’

‘He’d not reign there very long if he did that.’

‘He did ask the lads if they ever got any free samples.’

Marion wasn’t surprised at that. ‘He would.’

‘Anyroad,’ Polly said with a grin, ‘while they don’t actually give free samples, each worker gets a docket for two pints of beer a night. Colm and Chris won’t yet, of course, because neither of them is eighteen. Chris said when he is, he will give his dad his allowance, but I said he might be in the army when he’s eighteen so Pat may have to do without his beer.’

‘Yes,’ Marion said. ‘Worrying times, these, to have boys the age they are. I tried to get our Richard interested in the joining the Territorials. They’re looking for recruits and they might have taken him next year when he’s sixteen. Thought it might keep him out of the regular army for a bit, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He said until he is old enough to enlist he’ll do his bit in the brass foundry.’

‘My lads are the same,’ Polly said. ‘They said that Ansell’s will do till they are eighteen and then they both want to join the Royal Warwickshires. The brass foundry is probably making summat for this bloody war everyone is certain sure is coming our way, anyroad. Pat says a lot of firms are doing that now.’

‘It is. Richard said they’re getting new machines in soon, and new dies fitted to the old ones, and all work then will be war related.’

‘All this talk of war is scary,’ Polly said. ‘Pat seems to think that it’s inevitable.’

‘So does Bill.’

‘Makes you wonder where we’ll all be in a year’s time.’

‘Maybe it’s a good job we can’t see into the future.’

‘I suppose,’ Polly mused. ‘Funny how life turns out. You always seem to fall on your feet, though.’

‘That’s not really fair,’ Marion said. ‘A lot of my good fortune is because I married Bill and he has a good job.’

‘Yeah,’ said Polly. ‘And you kept your legs together till the ring was on your finger, though if I hadn’t been expecting, Mammy and Daddy would never have agreed to me marrying one of the Reillys.’

‘Maybe not,’ Marion said. ‘But that’s not really any excuse for … Look, Polly, when I spotted you staggering down the gravel drive carrying the bass bag you had taken with you into service that afternoon in June 1923, the blood ran like ice in my veins.’ She still carried that mental image with her. Her sister had always had more meat on her bones than she had, and her hair veered more towards blonde than brown, but apart from that they were very similar and both were pretty girls. Polly had just a dusting of pink on her cheekbones, a cluster of freckles below her eyes. That day, though, her face had been bright red and swollen with the tears she had shed and her hair falling over the face, and even her straw bonnet had been askew.

Polly nodded. ‘You knew what it was all about then, didn’t you?’

‘Course I did,’ Marion said. ‘That’s about the only reason that anyone is dismissed from service. Tell you, I was almighty glad that promotion to lady’s maid meant I had a room of my own and I could grab you before you alerted the house, and hide you away in there.’

‘You nearly shook the head from my shoulders.’

‘Can you wonder at it, Poll?’ Marion demanded. ‘I wanted you to say that you weren’t in the family way. I would have been so pleased that day to have been proved wrong.’

‘I never remember feeling so miserable,’ Polly said. ‘And you went wild when you knew who it was I’d lain with. And he didn’t take me down, not really. I mean, he didn’t make me or anything.’

‘Be quiet, Polly,’ Marion said, genuinely shocked. ‘Have you no shame? Don’t talk in that disgusting way. Did you at no time think of the consequences and that your disgrace and shame would taint the whole family?’

‘No,’ Polly said. ‘Not then I didn’t. I loved Pat, see. I wasn’t really a bad girl.’

Marion knew she wasn’t. Polly didn’t have a nasty bone in her body, but she had been very gullible then, and anxious to please when she was younger, and, Marion had to admit, hadn’t changed much. Polly had always wanted to be liked and probably still did.

There was only one answer, one way out of this terrible dilemma. ‘Well, Pat Reilly will have to be made to marry you, that’s all,’ Marion had said, but even as the words were out of her mouth she knew what Polly’s life would like, married to such a man. She doubted she’d ever have a penny piece to bless herself with and a houseful of babies before she was able to turn around.

‘I never minded marrying Pat,’ Polly said, and added a little defiantly, ‘and he didn’t have to be forced either. Despite everything, I still don’t regret that marriage. I was really glad that Lady Amelia gave you leave to go home with me and tell Mammy and Daddy,’ Polly added fervently. ‘I think Mammy might have killed me stone dead that day if you hadn’t been there.’

‘In all honesty I was little use to you,’ Marion admitted, ‘because when Mammy started laying into you and screaming vile and obscene words I never thought I would hear her say, I was too shocked to move. It was Daddy coming in from work that really saved you that day, though he too was shaken to the core at what you had done.’

‘He didn’t lay a hand on me either,’ Polly said. ‘For all Mammy wanted him to, he said there had been enough of that already and he went straight round to the Reillys. Pat always said he was tickled pink, learning that he was going to be a father.’

Pity he didn’t try harder to provide for him then. The words were on the tip of Marion’s tongue, but she bit them back as she remembered the shabby wedding hastily arranged at their parish church, Sacred Heart Catholic Church, on nearby Witton Road. The only people there were Pat’s loud and rumbustious family, who didn’t seem to see any shame in what the young people had done at all. Polly had worn an ordinary dress of tent-like proportions to try to hide her swollen stomach.

Polly was remembering that wedding too. ‘Remember Father McIntyre, with his nose stuck in the air like me and Pat smelled bad or summat?’

‘I remember,’ Marion said. ‘I suppose he was showing his disapproval. After all, he has known you all your life.’

‘He’s known Pat all his life too,’ Polly said, ‘but it didn’t give him any sort of right to behave like that. And then Mammy wouldn’t have any sort of celebration.’ She looked at Marion with a great smile on her face. ‘Pat’s family couldn’t believe it. All the way home they were complaining about it and in the end they went to the Outdoor and got some carry-out and we had our own celebration.’

Marion knew that the Reillys had been astounded because she had heard more than one complain, ‘Not even a drink? Mean buggers!’

However, Clara had thought there was nothing to celebrate. In her opinion, though marriage ? any sort of marriage ? brought partial respectability, the stupidest person in the world was able to count to nine when it mattered. Polly had behaved shame-lessly and that would reflect on her, as Polly’s mother, and no way did she feel like celebrating that fact.

Marion thought, though, that Polly had paid a heavy price for marrying Pat Reilly. That vision she had seen of Polly’s life the day she admitted her pregnancy had come true with a vengeance, for the babies came thick and fast. Polly’s first son, Chris, arrived when Marion had been married just two weeks and he was followed by Colm, Mary Ellen, Siobhan, Orla and Jack. When Jack was born something went wrong and Polly was told that she would be unlikely to conceive ever again. Marion comforted her sister, who was distressed at the news, but really she was glad that there were to be no more children as they couldn’t afford to keep the ones they had and over the years she’d had to help her sister out financially many a time.

Later that night she told Bill the news about the boys’ jobs and he too was glad that life might get a bit easier for them.

‘I’m sure Pat could have done more, and sooner than this,’ Marion said. ‘Course, if I say anything to our Polly she defends him to the hilt and claims he is trying to get work.’

‘Well, he may be,’ Bill said. ‘This is a major slump, you know. Jobs aren’t that easy to come by. Pat Reilly isn’t the only one unemployed today.’

‘He’s the only one married to my sister,’ Marion snapped. ‘Anyroad, when they haven’t food to put on the table you will see the man in the pub. You told me that yourself.’

Bill had indeed told her that, as he’d also said that Pat would often make a half-pint last all evening, but she chose not to remember that. In her eyes he was the man that had taken her young sister down and Bill doubted that she would ever really forgive Pat for it.

In bed that night, after listening to a broadcast that said if war was declared there would undoubtedly be raids from the air, Marion hoped that war would somehow be averted. It had been German planes that had bombed the Spanish town of Guernica two years before, in support of the dictator Franco, and many seemed to think then that Germany was showing the world what they could do.

Marion, remembering the newspaper pictures of the devastation, the town nearly razed to the ground, and knowing the numbers killed and badly injured, knew full well that what had been done in Spain could be done in Birmingham and other towns and cities if Britain were to declare war. She knew she would be worried chiefly for her family, but she didn’t want anything to happen to her home either. It wasn’t just bricks and mortar, it was where Bill had taken her after their marriage and she had taken pleasure in raising her children. All her dearest memories were wrapped up in that house, and these memories now crowded into her brain, driving away sleep.

She recalled that she had been in a fever of impatience to see where they would be living and so Bill had brought her here a week before the wedding. She knew the house was on Albert Road and that ran from the entrance to Aston Park to Witton Road, near to the vast array of shops on the Lichfield Road. It was wide enough for trams to run down the centre of it, and smallish factories and shops were mixed among the housing: a wholesale grocers, Marion noticed as she’d walked down the road arm in arm with Bill that first day, a clinic, a small factory and, across the road, a garage and repair shop and a sizeable office block.

The house itself was red brick, two-storeyed, with wide bay windows to the front, set back a little from the road behind a low grey stone wall. An entry ran down the side, which Bill told her was shared between their house and the one next door, and which led to the back gardens. Marion had loved it at first sight.

Bill had led her over the blue-brick yard to the white front door with an arch above it and a brass knocker and letterbox. She noticed the step needed a good scrubbing. Inside, the hall was decorated with black and white tiles. Stairs led off the right and there was a door to the left. When Bill told her that was the parlour she couldn’t believe it. A parlour! And she opened the door to have a look and gave a sigh of contentment. Of course it would only be used on high days and holidays. But just to own a parlour raised a person’s status.

A short corridor led to the back of the house. The room at the end was where Bill said they would spend most of their time, though Marion was surprised when Bill told her that she wouldn’t be cooking on the range set into the fireplace, but on a brand-new gas cooker in the kitchen. Marion remembered how nervous she had been. She had never had a gas cooker before and wasn’t at all sure that it was safe, but Bill assured her that it was, that it was the latest thing, and she had found it so easy to use after a very little while.

Bill had also opened the door to the cellar as they went towards the kitchen and Marion had thought that that would be where the coalman would tip his load because she had seen the grating just to the side of the bay window. But Bill had ordered a shed to be erected in the back garden for the coal: he didn’t think it healthy to have all that coal dust swirling in the air inside the house. Marion thought he was being overcautious until she remembered both Bill’s parents had died from lung disease. Then she could more understand his concern.

Marion enthused over the house to her parents: ‘A sizeable kitchen and a scullery and a yard, and a lovely little garden at the back, and upstairs three large bedrooms and a bathroom, no less, and even hot water from this geyser on the wall you light when you want a bath or owt, and electric lights all over the house …’

She knew her parents would be glad at least one daughter was being looked after properly by her husband.

A week later Marion married Bill Whittaker, a man her parents approved of, who she had been courting for six months, and who was in full employment in a brass foundry. Her wedding day was a sharp contrast to her sister’s. She had worn a white dress that she was entitled to wear, which finished daringly halfway down her calf, and a veil fastened to her hair with a halo of rosebuds. The reception was well attended with family, friends and neighbours to toast the bride and groom’s health.

Polly hadn’t been allowed to go because she was too near her time and, Clara said, not fit to be seen. She thought it scandalous that Polly would go about without a coat to cover herself up, but Marion knew that she probably hadn’t the money to buy a coat that would fit her swollen body.

When Polly moved into Upper Thomas Street, just a few months later, the dissimilarity in the two sister’s lives was even more obvious. Marion had indeed fallen on her feet and anyone but Polly might have been envious, but she had never shown that.

As Marion drifted to sleep she wondered if she’d have been so generous that if the positions had been reversed.

Despite the war talk around them, Magda and Missie were very excited as June approached. Their seventh birthdays were in the first week and then just two weeks later they were going to make their First Holy Communion. The whole class at school had been preparing for it for months.

One of the things they had to know was their catechism, and Magda and Missie had tried really hard to learn it because sometimes the classroom door would open suddenly and Father McIntyre would be there to test everyone.

The whole class would be on edge – even the teacher looked all tense and stern, Magda noticed ? as Father McIntyre would point at the children at random and fire questions from the catechism at them. Magda would feel as if she was sitting on hot pins because she was pretty sure that if the priest pointed at her and barked out a question, her mind would go blank. So she avoided his eye at all costs and was mightily glad he never chose her. He seemed more interested in the boys, who often gave wrong answers and didn’t seem to care. She knew, though, they would get it in the neck from the teacher later.

There was another trial to go through first before Communion and that was confession. The twins were familiar with the little wooden box in the church where the priest went in one side and they would have to go in the other and tell the priest all the bold things they had done.

‘It won’t be so bad when we’re going every week or so,’ Missie said as they made their way to school the morning that they were going to confession for the first time. ‘I don’t know that I can remember what I have done wrong over the past seven years.’

‘Not a lot, I wouldn’t have said,’ Sarah told her. ‘You never seem to get into trouble.’

‘Not like me,’ Magda said gloomily. ‘Grandma Murray called me a limb of Satan last Sunday.’

Sarah laughed. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I wouldn’t take that to heart, if I were you. But then,’ she went on with a wry smile, ‘she might be a help to you if you can’t remember what you’ve done wrong over the years. If you call and see her she could probably supply you with a list.’

‘And if you told the priest all that Grandma told you to say you would spend ages on your knees doing the penance he gave you,’ Missie said, smiling at the vision that conjured up.

‘I’m not going anywhere near Grandma Murray,’ Magda said with a slight shudder. ‘I will just tell the priest what I remember and that will be that.’

‘Are you nervous?’ Sarah asked.

‘A bit,’ Magda admitted.

‘It’s just strange, that’s all,’ Sarah said. ‘You get used to it and, remember, he can’t say anything you tell him to anyone else.’

‘I know that, but he’ll know, won’t he?’

‘Well, of course. But won’t it be worth all this nervousness to wear that beautiful white dress and veil?’

‘Ooh, yes,’ Magda said, and Missie nodded emphatically. Just to think about her Communion dress sent tingles of excitement all though Magda, which began in her toes and spread all over her body. Marion had taken the girls to the Bull Ring to buy them both snow-white dresses decorated with beautiful sparkling seed pearls and lace and pretty pale blue rosebuds. The veils were fastened to their hair with white satin bands also decorated with the pale blue rosebuds, and they had new white socks and sandals. When they got home they tried their outfits on for their father to see and he’d said they looked like a couple of princesses. When he kissed them both Magda was very surprised to see tears in his eyes.

‘I had a dress like that once,’ Sarah said, remembering her First Communion day.

‘I know,’ Magda said. ‘Mom told me. She said she gave it to Aunt Polly after.’

‘Yes,’ Sarah said. ‘Poor Mary Ellen had to have a dress loaned from the school, but my dress came in for Siobhan and Orla.’

‘I would have hated to have a First Communion dress loaned that way,’ Missie said. ‘Wouldn’t you, Magda?’

Magda nodded and Sarah said, ‘You thank your lucky stars that you didn’t have to, but there are far worst things about being poor than a secondhand Communion dress.’

‘I’d hate to be poor as well.’

‘Be glad that you’re not then,’ Sarah said. ‘There are a great many poor these days. We are luckier than a lot of families, and don’t you ever forget that.’

The twins knew all about the poor. Uncle Pat and Auntie Polly were poor, and their children wore boots and clothes donated by the Evening Mail Christmas Tree Fund. They knew that despite the help their mother gave Polly, without the Christmas Tree Fund their cousins would probably have had to go barefoot to school a lot of the time, and been without warm, adequate clothing through the winter. Sarah was right, they were luckier than many families. But the twins didn’t feel lucky when they filed into church that Friday afternoon for their confession.

When it was Magda’s turn she slid from her pew, aware her legs were all of a dither, and went into the little box. It was quite dim with the door shut, and when she kneeled down beside the grille she could just about see the outline of Father McIntyre on the other side and she whispered the words they had been practising at school: ‘Bless me, Father for I have sinned. This is my first confession.’

She stopped then, not sure what to say because whatever her grandmother said, Magda thought she hadn’t sinned much. She was never cheeky or disobedient to her parents, grandparents or teachers or any other grown-up, because she would have had the legs smacked off her if she had been, and the same thing would happen if she was found to be telling lies. She’d never dream of taking something that didn’t belong to her and had never even put half her collection money in her shoe as she had seen Tony do sometimes.

Then she remembered how lax she was about prayers and how she was often in bed before she thought of them, but she always told her mother that she had said them when she came to tuck the twins in, so that was adding lying to it as well and so she told the priest that. She didn’t mention the fact that she sometimes hated Tony, and her grandmother too, and she supposed that was a sin, though not, she thought, the sort of thing she could admit to a priest. She had to say three Hail Marys and a Glory Be as a penance. Missie and most of their classmates had been given the same.

‘We must make sure that we don’t do something really dreadful tomorrow,’ Missie warned as she and Magda walked home together afterwards. ‘The teacher said that our souls must be as white as snow to receive Holy Communion.’

‘We never get the chance to do something really dreadful,’ Magda said, but she made a mental note that she would make sure she didn’t forget her prayers that night, or Saturday either, to make sure she’d have no stain on her soul when she went to the rails.

That Sunday morning all the girls were to the left of the aisle and Magda sneaked a look at the boys on the other side. Many had smart new white shirts, and the richer amongst them also had black shiny shoes and new grey trousers, and socks that probably stayed up better than the ones many wore to school, which resided in concertina rolls around their ankles unless they were held up by garters. But all in all the boys’ clothes were very commonplace when compared to the girls’ finery. In fact, the only thing that marked this day as a special one for the boys was the satin sash they each had around their shoulders, which lay across the body and fastened at the hip.

The strains of the organ brought people to their feet. Marion watched all the children looking so angelic on this very special day. They were quieter than she had ever known them. The sense of occasion had got into even the most mischievous, and there was no fidgeting or whispering, and no one dropped their pennies for the collection. As they left their seats to go up to the rails a little later, she felt tears stinging her eyes as she wondered what was in store for these young children if their country went to war.

THREE

Everywhere that sultry summer there was evidence of things to come. Big trenches were dug in Aston Park, swathes of brown where once there had been green grass, and the following week all the railings were hacked down. By early August, strange windowless buildings appeared everywhere and the older children were drafted in to fill sacks with sand.

By mid-August they heard about the blackout that would come into force on 1 September. Every householder was told to black out the windows, streetlights would be turned off, no cars would be allowed lights, and even torches would be forbidden.

‘So you are right as usual, Bill,’ Marion said. ‘They must expect attacks from the air or they wouldn’t be going to so much trouble. And there’s a fine of two hundred pounds if there is a chink of light showing. I’d better go down the Bull Ring Saturday and see what I can get.’ She sighed as she went on, ‘It will cost something, too, to recurtain the whole house. Thank God Polly’s two lads are working now. She will probably have the money to buy the material. Mammy has an old treadle she won’t mind us using, especially if we offer to make hers up as well.’

But before Marion got to go down to the Bull Ring, an education officer called round with the headmaster of the school to talk about evacuation of the children. Though Marion was worried about them, and how they would cope in the event of war, she thought it a monstrous plan to send her children to some strangers in what the Government deemed ‘a place of safety’. She rejected the idea quite definitely, and Polly, she found, had done the same.

‘Whatever we face, we face together. That’s how I see it,’ Polly said to Marion. ‘I mean, they could end up going to anyone.’

‘Couldn’t agree more,’ Marion said. ‘The twins are just seven and Tony was only nine in April. They’re far too young to be sent away from home, and Sarah said she wanted to go nowhere either. It would feel like running away, she said, and anyway, she’s looking forward to leaving school and earning some money.’

‘Can’t blame them, though, can you?’ Polly said. ‘Can’t do owt in this world without money, and that I know only too well.’

One Friday evening towards the end of August Marion turned on the wireless and caught the tail end of an announcement: ‘As a precaution gas masks are being issued to every person in Britain. These will be available from 1 September. Please study your local papers to find out where your nearest collection point will be.’

‘Gas masks, Bill, for God’s sake,’ Marion cried, and her face was as white as lint.

‘It’s just in case,’ Bill said. ‘You heard what he said.’

‘Yes, but even so …’

‘In the last war the Germans used gas to disable the troops,’ Bill reminded her. ‘You know that yourself. You’ve seen some poor sods down the Bull Ring with their lungs near ate away with mustard gas. Twenty years on they might have worked out how to drop it on the civilian population. I’m not saying they will,’ he added, looking at Marion’s terror-stricken face, ‘but surely it’s better to be safe than sorry?’

‘I suppose it is,’ Marion said. ‘It’s just that I don’t want to think of it.’

Bill put his arms around her. ‘None of us do, not really, and there is something else that I must tell you now that war seems inevitable.’

‘What?’

‘Well, it has been in my head for some time, but I haven’t wanted to upset you by speaking of it sooner,’ Bill said. ‘But now you really need to know that when war is declared, I intend to enlist.’

‘No, Bill!’ Marion cried. ‘No, Bill, you can’t.’

Bill tightened his arms around her. ‘Don’t take on, old girl,’ he said. ‘You must have known this was on the cards.’

But Marion hadn’t known. Such thoughts had never crossed her mind. Bill had a family, responsibilities, and she had thought that would make him safe, or as safe as anyone can be in a war. She pulled herself out of his embrace and said, ‘Just how did you expect me to react, Bill? Did you think that I would be jumping up and down with delight?’

‘You know how I feel about Hitler and his bloody bunch of hoodlum Germans,’ Bill protested. ‘I’m doing this because I want to try and protect you.’

‘Sorry, Bill, that doesn’t make me feel any better.’

‘Look,’ said Bill, ‘Hitler and his armies are marching all over Europe. He already has Austria and Czechoslovakia, and now he is casting his eye over Poland. Where will he look next? If he conquers the Low Countries he will make his way to France, and if France falls we are just a step across the Channel. Believe me, Marion, Britain will need every man they can get to take on the German Army and try and stop them in their tracks.’

‘I can see they might need young men,’ Marion conceded. ‘But not men as old as you, and family men at that.’

‘I’m thirty-nine and that’s not old,’ Bill said. ‘Not according to the army, anyway.’

‘But what of your job?’ Marion cried. ‘How will they manage at the foundry if all the men go off soldiering?’

‘The foundry will manage well enough without me,’ Bill said. ‘And I imagine the families of men fighting for their King and Country are well enough provided for. After all, I am unlikely to be the only family man in the Forces. Pat’s enlisting with me.’

‘He may as well,’ Marion said bitterly. ‘He at least has no job to leave, nor ever has had.’ Marion began to sob in earnest then for she knew that before making any big decision, Bill would always weigh up the pros and cons, and he would have done it this time because this was one of the biggest decisions he would ever make. Once he was resolved on a course of action, though, he was immovable. She saw the lift of his chin and the glint in his eyes, and though tears gushed from her eyes she knew her husband would leave her – leave them all ? and go to a war from which he might never return.

When Tony, Magda and Missie were told about their father going to be a soldier they thought at first that it was the most exciting news in the world. They couldn’t understand why their mother wasn’t as delighted as they were.

‘Well, I suppose that she doesn’t want him going away,’ Sarah said as they walked to school the following day.

It was news to Magda that her father would have to go and live elsewhere and she said, ‘Won’t he be able to be a soldier and stay at home then?’

Tony gave a hoot of laughter. ‘Course he can’t stay here, stupid. He’ll have to go away and kill Germans, won’t he? He’ll be shooting them with his rifle and sticking his bayonet in their innards and …’

‘That’s enough, Tony,’ Sarah said sharply.

Tony gave a shrug. ‘Well, Magda is such a baby.’

‘No I ain’t.’

‘Yes you are,’ Tony said. ‘I bet you thought all he would do was march around all day in his smart uniform behind a big brass band. You did, dain’t you? That’s all you thought they did?’

Magda didn’t know what soldiers did, but she wasn’t going to admit that to Tony, so she stuck her tongue out at him, taking care that Sarah didn’t see, before saying, ‘No I dain’t, see.’

‘Yes you did,’ Tony retorted. ‘You really are stupid, Magda Whittaker. We’re at war, ain’t we?’

‘I know that, don’t I?’ Magda cried. ‘But what’s war, anyroad?’

Tony wasn’t absolutely sure either, but he said, ‘War means that our dad has got to go and kill people before they kill him, don’t it, Sarah?’

Both the twins’ faces paled ? they’d never thought of anyone killing their father ? and Sarah was cross at Tony just blurting it out like that. But that’s what was going to happen eventually and it would be doing the twins no favours to tell them lies, so her voice was gentle as she said, ‘Tony’s got it about right, because that’s what soldiers have to do.’

Magda caught Missie’s eyes and suddenly thought maybe it wasn’t such a good idea for her father to be a soldier after all. She knew that Missie felt the same.

Tony saw the look and said, ‘The pair of you are plain stupid.’

‘Tony, I won’t tell you again,’ Sarah said sharply. ‘Magda and Missie are over two years younger than you. How are they to know these things? We have never been to war before. And don’t worry,’ she added to the twins as they went into the school yard, ‘Dad won’t be in danger for ages yet, because he will have to be trained to be a soldier.’

Magda sighed with relief. Tony was probably right, she thought. She didn’t know much about going to war but she knew one thing: just talking about it made everyone bad-tempered.

The following Sunday the children’s grandparents came to tea as usual. Bill had known that his mother-in-law would have something to say about his decision to enlist and he wasn’t disappointed. As soon as he entered the house with the twins after their walk, she started on him, berating him roundly for his lack of concern and understanding, and was still going strong when they sat down to tea. Tony had sloped off as usual, so it was just the twins sitting on the horsehair sofa, being stabbed to death with its stuffing, while their grandmother continued to carp on in her thin, shrill voice, even more vitriolic than she usually was.

Magda, casting a glimpse her way, thought that it was just as if she had anger bubbling up inside her, so much so, that it was coming up in spittle and forming a white line along her thin bloodless lips. Her grandfather valiantly tried to deflect the conversation away from Bill until in the end she snapped, ‘Be quiet, Eddie. What are you going on about? There is only one concern here and that’s Bill and his stupidity.’

Bill looked up at Clara’s face and sighed before saying mildly enough, ‘Well, Clara, I know from experience you won’t let a matter drop until you have worried it to death like a dog with a bone so you might as well have your say.’

Clara glared at him and wiped her mouth and fingers on a napkin before saying, ‘What I really want to know is whatever possessed you to even think about enlisting like this? It’s totally irresponsible.’

Bill shook his head. ‘I don’t see it that way.’

‘There is no other way to see it,’ Clara burst out, ‘What’s the matter with you?’

‘I am prepared to fight, because I see the Germans gaining more and more power as each day passes,’ Bill said. ‘They won’t stop until they have the whole of Europe under their dominance and we must all fight to prevent that. I’m going to war because I love my family and want to protect them, and I would feel less of a man if I didn’t do it.’

Even Marion, who didn’t want her husband to join in any war, was impressed by the sincere and yet firm way Bill had answered her mother. The children were all awed, not so much by the words their father had used, but by the fact that he was the first person they knew to render their grandmother speechless.

Before Clara had time to think of some retort, Bill spoke directly to his father-in-law, for whom he had always had great respect. ‘Do you see my point in any of this, Eddie?’

Eddie glanced first at his wife, but then he said, ‘I do, Bill. You’ve put it very well and you’re right. It is no good expecting the man either side of you to volunteer while you stay safe and dry. Britain is a much smaller country than Germany and so needs all the soldiers that it can get. This will not be just a young man’s war. Sometimes, however painful, sacrifices have to be made.’

‘Pat is enlisting along with me,’ Bill said.

He heard the snort of disapproval from Clara because she had less time for Pat Reilly than Marion had. ‘You can be as scornful as you like,’ he snapped, ‘but Pat Reilly at least has as much courage as the next man, for we all know that what we’re going to be involved in will be no picnic.’

Marion knew it wasn’t, and while she had exercised her right to say something to Bill on the subject, she hated her mother criticising him so, and in front of the children too. Anyway, she knew the die was cast. As she got to her feet, she said to her mother, ‘There’s no point in going on and on about it now, Mammy. The decision has been made and Bill has told you why he made it and that’s an end to it as far as I’m concerned.’

Bill looked at Marion with astonishment.

She never stood up to her mother, but she had suddenly thought that if Bill wasn’t going to be around, it was time she developed some backbone and she was far too old to allow herself to be browbeaten by her mother.

‘And if we’ve all finished, shall we clear up here so that the children can eat?’ she went on. ‘I’m sure they think their throats have been cut.’

Still Clara said nothing, but the atmosphere could have been cut with a knife as, with a sniff of disapproval, she rose from the table. She left the room in silence, outrage and anger showing on every line of her body.

‘Methinks it’s a little frosty on the Western Front this evening,’ Bill commented quietly, and both Richard and Sarah had to bite their lips to stop their laughter escaping.

‘Why are you putting those horrible black curtains up at the windows?’ Magda asked her mother a few days later.

‘We have to, and that’s all there is to it,’ Marion said from her precarious stance on the dining chair. ‘They have to go up at all the windows.’

‘Even ours?’ Magda said. ‘Our bedrooms and that?’

‘Fraid so.’

‘But why?’

‘So the enemy aircraft won’t see us, that’s why,’ Tony said.

‘How do you know that?’ Marion asked sharply.

‘Jack told me.’

‘He would.’

‘Well, he’s right, ain’t he?’ Tony said.

Marion sighed. She knew that she couldn’t protect her children with a load of lies – the time was past for that. They had a right to know what might happen if the country went to war. She said, ‘Yes, Tony, Jack is right.’

And then Tony turned to his younger sisters and said, ‘Jack told me that enemy aircraft will carry bombs that they’ll drop on us and try and blow us all up.’

‘They won’t, will they, Mom?’ Missie said, and Marion could hear the nervous wobble in her voice.

She knew Missie and Magda wanted an assurance that she couldn’t give them and so she got off the chair and put her arms around each of them as she answered carefully. ‘No one knows yet what the Germans will do when the war begins, but your dad is having someone come to look at our cellar in the next couple of days, and if necessary they will reinforce it and then Hitler and his planes can do his worst and we will be as safe as houses, especially if it is pitch black here, because then the German pilots wouldn’t know where to drop their bombs, would they?’

‘Won’t they see by the streetlights?’ Magda asked.

‘No, because they won’t be on either.’

‘Ooh,’ Missie said, ‘it will be real scary to go out then.’

‘It will take some getting used to,’ Marion conceded. ‘But if that’s how it must be then that’s how it must be.’

By the time they were ready for bed that night, all the horrid black curtains were hung at the windows, but not before Sarah had crisscrossed tape on the glass. She saw the twins’ eyes upon her and explained, ‘If the bombs do fall, then this prevents the glass from flying into the room.’

Magda imagined bombs exploding loud enough and near enough to blow out a person’s windows. She shuddered in sudden fear as she said, ‘So this is just in case as well?’

‘That’s it.’

‘Some of the kids at school are going to the country the day after tomorrow, in case there’s a war,’ Magda said.

‘Yeah, Mary Cox had to get her gas mask early ‘cos her mom is sending her to the country,’ Missie said. ‘They told her the kids’ masks look like Mickey Mouse, but she said they don’t and they stink like mad. She said we’ve all got to get them.’

‘That’s another precaution,’ Sarah said. ‘In case the Germans drop gas.’

‘I think war, even preparing for war, is all really frightening,’ Missie said.

‘Not half,’ Magda agreed. ‘Bloody terrifying, that’s what it is.’

Sarah cuffed her sister lightly on the side of the head. ‘War or no war, Magda Whittaker,’ she said sternly, ‘I will wash your mouth out with carbolic if I hear you using words like that.’

‘Dad uses words like that, ‘cos I’ve heard him,’ Magda maintained.

‘That’s different, and you know it, and if you don’t listen to me, I’ll tell Mom. Then you’ll be sorry.’

Magda knew she would be. Her mother had far harder hands than Sarah. So, though she still thought the world a bloody scary place, she kept those thoughts to herself.

On Friday morning the children to be evacuated were assembled in the school yard and Marion took Tony and the twins down to see their friends go off. The evacuees had labels with their names on pinned to their coats, and boxes, which Marion said held their gas masks, were hung around their necks. Some had their change of clothes and personal bits and pieces in carrier bags, while others held small cases, or had haversacks strapped to their back, like Mary, who was standing in the playground looking a little lost, but hanging on to her five-year-old brother, Raymond, for grim death.

She gave a half-hearted attempt at a smile when she saw the twins, but despite that, she seemed cloaked in misery. In fact most of the children looked the same, and the mothers were little better, for many of them were in tears, though some were trying to put a brave face on it.

The teachers going with them rallied the children into some sort of order and then the headmaster led them in a rendition of ‘Run Rabbit Run’ as they marched towards the gate and to Aston station.

‘Where is the place of safety they’re going, anyroad?’ Magda asked as they walked home.

‘No one knows,’ Marion said. ‘That’s the terrible thing. Phyllis, Mary and Raymond’s mother, said all they were told was that wherever it was there would be host families ready to take in the children and care for them. She has no idea where that place is or what sort of family her two will end up with.’

‘Mary dain’t want to go,’ Magda said, ‘cos she was blarting her eyes out on the bus.’

‘Her mother was as well,’ Missie added.

‘Ah, yes,’ Marion said. ‘Poor woman was in a right state about it. One of the problems is that she doesn’t know whether she’s doing the right thing or not. She was just thinking that if the raids do come, she has to see to the two other little ones at home, so the eldest two would be better out of it for a while. If there are no raids she will have them back quick as lightning, I think.’

No one made any response to this because as they turned into their road, right beside their front gate women had gathered, earnestly discussing something.

‘What is it? What’s up?’ Marion said.

Marion’s next-door neighbour, Deidre Whitehead, answered, ‘News just came through on the wireless. Hitler’s armies have invaded Poland and they are fighting for their lives.’

Marion felt quite faint, although it was news that she had been expecting.

Ada Shipley said, ‘That’s it then. The balloon has definitely gone up. We’re going to have another war and if my lad’s right it will be bloodier even than the Great War. God help him, wherever he is tonight.’

Hear, hear, thought Marion as she hurried the children indoors. God help all of us.

The gas masks that Marion brought home for them later that day were just as awful as Mary had said, and they didn’t look a bit like any picture of Mickey Mouse that Magda had ever seen.

‘I can’t wear that,’ she complained, frantically tugging off the mask that Marion fitted on her. ‘I can’t breathe with that flipping thing covering my face.’

‘Of course you can,’ Marion said unsympathetically. ‘You will be glad enough to wear it if there are gas attacks. This is not the time to make a fuss about little things.’

‘If you ask me, not being able to breathe is a pretty big thing,’ Tony said. ‘I can’t breathe either, and I’ll tell you summat else as well: they won’t have to bother with sending no gas over here; the stink of rubber will do the job for them.’

Sarah felt sorry for the children. The gas masks were hideous, very smelly and uncomfortable to wear, and breathing once they were on was not easy. However, she felt she had to show the lead in this and so she said, ‘All right, so they’re not nice, but if we have to wear them then we have to, and that’s all there is to it. I’m sure that it’s just a case of getting used to it.’

‘Huh!’ said Tony contemptuously, but Marion threw Sarah a look of gratitude.

That night the talk around the tea table was all about the news that day. ‘The bosses heard it announced and came and told us lot on the shop floor,’ Bill said. ‘We have no option now, so I told the gaffer I’m off to enlist on Monday morning. He was prepared for it because I told him a while ago what I intended, once war was official, like.’

Marion swallowed the lump that seemed lodged in her throat and said, ‘Did he mind?’

‘Ain’t no good minding things like this in a war situation,’ Bill said. ‘Anyroad, he didn’t. He actually said if he had been a younger man he would have done the same thing and I weren’t the only one to go, by any means.’

‘He ain’t either, Mom,’ Richard said. ‘Remember them Jewish apprentices I told you about? Well, they’re all enlisting too. One of them said that he’s avenging the death of his parents because he thinks they must be dead or they would have got word to him by now. I can quite see how he feels. There were others as well. There was a right buzz in the canteen over dinner, wasn’t there, Dad?’

‘There was, son. And if all those who said they were enlisting actually do it, the foundry will be very short-handed. Although women can take on a lot of the men’s work, like they’re talking about, some of the foundry tasks will probably be too heavy for most of them.’

‘So what will they do about that?’

Bill shrugged. ‘Search me,’ he said. ‘But every man jack of us that can get out there and fight should, because we have to stop the Nazis while there’s still time.’

Bill’s words brought a chill to all of them.

‘I can’t help wishing you didn’t feel this way, just as I wish that we were not at war with anyone,’ Marion said, breaking the silence, ‘but I know what you have to do and though I can’t say truthfully that you go with my blessing, I’ll support you the best way I can.’

‘You can’t say fairer than that,’ Bill replied, and as he put his hand over hers on the table, Marion saw his eyes were very bright.

No one dawdled at Mass that Sunday for the Prime Minister was going to speak to the nation on the wireless just after eleven o’clock. Polly and Pat, and other neighbours without their own wireless sets, were crowded into the Whittakers’ and at a quarter past eleven they learned ‘this country is at war with Germany’. As the broadcast came to an end, some of the listeners had tears trickling down their cheeks, yet no one was surprised by the news.

Just then, a dreadful, ear-splitting sound rent the air. They all knew what it was – the siren signalling an attack ? and they all looked at each other fearfully, not sure what to do. It proved to be a false alarm but it galvanised Marion into action. For days, both in the newspaper and on the wireless, the Government had been advising householders to get together a shelter bag and put into it anything of value, such as ration books, identity cards, saving and bank books, insurance policies, treasured photographs, and maybe a pack of cards or dominoes, or favourite books for the children.

Marion hadn’t done it, as if not doing it was going to change what had been staring her in the face for weeks. Nor had she cleared out the cellar, though now that it had been reinforced it was where they might be spending a lot of their time. Their cellar was bigger than most, but this just meant that there was more room to house junk. As the all clear sounded, Marion said to Polly, ‘I went down yesterday and I had quite forgotten the rubbish we put in there, like the rickety wooden chairs, and that battered sagging sofa that we bought when we were first married.’

‘You might be glad of places to sit when the raids come.’

‘I know,’ Marion said. ‘I shan’t throw anything away. But I will ask Bill to look at the chairs. He’ll soon make them a bit sturdier; he’s very handy that way.’

‘Oh, I wish Pat was,’ Polly said. ‘He finds it hard to knock a nail in.’

Marion said nothing, because that was best whenever Pat’s name came up. Instead she said, ‘I wonder what Mammy will say about the recent turn of events.’

‘Well, you’ll know soon enough, won’t you?’ Polly said. ‘I suppose they’re coming to tea as usual?’

Marion nodded.

‘You might not be so keen on having them over every week once Bill joins the army,’ Polly went on. ‘I doubt a soldier will get as much money as Bill picks up now, and you may find it a bit of a struggle. If you’re strapped at all we can help you out. God knows, you’ve helped us out enough in the past.’

‘Let’s just see how we go for now,’ Marion said. ‘We’ll likely know more when the men come back from the recruiting office tomorrow.’

FOUR

It was a fair step to Thorpe Street Barracks, the other side of town, near the Horse Fair in Edgbaston, not a place either Pat or Bill had been to before. They kept up a steady pace, though as they passed the White Lion pub Pat looked at it longingly because the day was warm one.

‘I could murder a cold pint just now.’

‘It would be welcome right enough,’ Bill said, ‘but the pubs won’t be open yet awhile. Anyroad, it wouldn’t look well, enlisting in the army stinking of beer.’

‘Yeah, maybe not,’ Pat conceded. ‘And we’re nearly there, I’d say. This bloke down our yard, who went last week, said the barracks is about halfway down the road.’

As they passed rows of back-to-back houses Bill asked Pat how Polly had taken the news that he was going to enlist. ‘Well, she weren’t over the moon or owt,’ Pat said. ‘She come round, like, in the end, ‘cos it isn’t as if I’ve got a job to leave, like you have. Anyroad, as I said to Poll, if we can kick them Jerries into shape soon, like, then our Chris might not be drawn into it. Tell you the truth, Bill, I’d give my right arm for my lads to stay out of this little lot. I mean, they haven’t really had any sort of life yet, have they?’

‘No, you’re right, of course,’ Bill agreed.

‘How did Marion cope with it?’

‘She kicked up a bit of a stink,’ Bill said. ‘Mind you, she doesn’t hold a candle to her mother. Bloody old vixen, she is.’

‘Did you tell Clara that we were enlisting together?’

‘Yeah, I did.’

‘Bet that didn’t go down too well. That woman hates my guts. I’ve never managed to provide for Polly the way the old woman thought I should.’

‘Yeah, but that wasn’t your fault,’ Bill said. ‘Anyroad, I think she has a short memory. She came from very humble beginnings herself, Marion told me. For the first few years of her life she was brought up in a damp, smelly, rat-infested cellar because her parents couldn’t afford anything better. Eddie wasn’t at the rolling mills then; he was a porter down at New Street railway station and he had to go each day to see if he’d be set on. Marion said that sometimes he had no work and so no money for days. She was often hungry and barefoot. D’you know, she began life as scullery maid in a large country house in Edgbaston when she was just ten years old?’

‘Did she?’ Pat said. ‘Polly never told me that. Course, being younger, she’d hardly be aware of it. Anyroad, I thought there were laws about that kind of thing?’

Bill nodded. ‘Marion should by rights have been at school until she was twelve, but apparently Clara said she could read, write and reckon up, and that was all the learning she would need, and a sight more than Clara herself had ever had, and it was time that she was working. She was so small when she began work she couldn’t reach the sinks and had to stand on a board. It must have been hard for her for she said some of the pots were nearly as big as she was and there were a great many of them and the hours were long. And yet she claims she was happy because when she began there it was the first time she could ever remember being warm and properly dressed, even in the winter. She lived in the attic of the big house, which she shared with the kitchen maid and two housemaids. For the first time in her life she had a comfortable bed of her own and a cupboard beside it to put her clothes in. She said it was like luxury.

‘She also had plenty to eat, because the master and mistress were generous, and Cook was a kindly soul who always maintained that the staff worked harder when their stomachs were full.’

‘Polly told me that,’ Pat said. ‘She said they always looked forward to her coming home on a day off because the cook would pack up a big basket for them all. Apart from that, their lives were hard enough and she said nearly all her brothers and sisters died. Eddie must have been glad to get that job at the rolling mills.’

‘Well, it meant at least they could move into that back-to-back in Yates Street,’ Bill said. ‘Marion thought that things might get better for them all at last.’

‘Aye, and then old Clara was knocked for six when Michael died on one of those bleeding coffin ships,’ Pat said. ‘Polly remembers the unhappiness in the house then, although she was only young herself.’

‘Yeah, but Clara never let herself get over it,’ Bill said. ‘I’m not saying that you wouldn’t be upset – Christ, it would tear the heart out of me to lose just one of my kids – but in the end you have to face it and go on, and she’s never done that. All I’m saying is, Eddie couldn’t get a regular job for years and neither could his sons, which is why they made for the States in the first place, so I can’t understand why Clara should take against you for finding things to be the same. That’s just life, that is.’

‘Huh, I don’t worry myself about anything that old harridan says to me. It’s like water off a duck’s back.’

‘Good job,’ Bill said. ‘Anyroad, here we are.’

The barracks were large and imposing, and decorated with posters urging men to enlist.

‘Come on, let’s get it over with,’ Pat said, and they went in through the wide, square entrance with turrets on either side.

The entrance hall was packed, but those in charge seemed to have it all in hand and the recruits were dealt with speedily. When all the formalities had been done and the forms filled in, they signed their names and were officially enlisted in the army, subject to their medicals.

When Bill learned that in the army he would be earning fourteen shillings a week of which one shilling and eleven pence would be deducted for his keep he was not unduly alarmed. In wartime he assumed he would have little to spend his money on, but he was interested in how much his family would be allocated while he was away fighting for King and Country.

‘That will depend on how many children you have,’ the official told him.

‘I have five,’ Bill said.

‘Are any of those children working?’

‘The eldest one.’

‘There will be no allowance for that one then,’ the official said. ‘For the others a penny for each of them will be taken from your wages every week.’

‘A penny?’

‘Yes, and the Government will add tuppence for each child in addition to that, which brings it to another shilling a week.’

It was a pittance. A shilling a week to feed and clothe four growing children. With a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach Bill asked, ‘And my wife, – what allowance has she?’

‘She has what is called a Separation Allowance, which amounts to one shilling and one penny a day, and there will also be another sixpence taken from your wages for her.’

Bill did the calculations. Marion would have the princely sum of nine shillings and a penny for all of them to live on.

‘Is that all?’ Bill cried. ‘She won’t be able to live on that. Almighty Christ, the rent alone is twelve shillings a week.’

‘Everyone has the same, Mr Whittaker,’ the official said coldly. ‘We cannot make a special case for your wife.’

‘No, but–’

‘Mr Whittaker, those are the rates and that is that,’ the official told him firmly. ‘I have a lot of people to see besides yourself and however long you argue, your family’s entitlement will remain the same.’

Bill had no alternative but to leave. Outside in the corridor he found Pat waiting for him.

‘God,’ Pat said ironically, ‘at least they give the wife and kids plenty to live on. Keep them in the lap of luxury, that.’

Bill shook his head. ‘I don’t know how I am going to face Marion and tell her this. She’ll never manage on it. Richard can’t give her any more than he does because his wage as a junior apprentice is only nine and eleven pence. Sarah is fourteen next month and will be leaving school then, but even if she is able to get a job it won’t pay very well. Christ, Pat, I’ve been bringing home three pounds ten shillings every week, more with overtime, which I did most weeks.’

His heart sank as he remembered how Marion would often say with pride that she had never visited a pawn shop, never had reason to, not like her sister, Polly, who never seemed to be out of the place. As he and Pat turned for home again he gave a heavy sigh.

‘That’s the sigh of a weary man,’ Pat smiled.

‘A guilty one, perhaps,’ Bill said. ‘How do they expect a woman to buy food, coal and pay the rent on the pittance they allow them? And that’s taking no account of clothes and boots growing children need.’

‘I know,’ Pat said. ‘It’s a bugger, all right. Polly won’t be so bad, see, because the boys get good enough money at Ansell’s. And even in a war, people will still want beer, won’t they? More rather than less, I would have said, and Mary Ellen has been working in Woolworths for over a year now and she tips up her share too.’

Bill saw that, for the first time, the Reillys would be better off than the Whittakers. Their rent, too, was less than half what the Whittakers paid. ‘And don’t forget the Christmas Tree Fund will help you with clothes and boots for the kids,’ Pat went on.

Bill shook his head dumbly. Marion had often said she would die of shame if she couldn’t provide for their own children and had to rely on handouts from the Evening Mail Christmas Tree Fund.

Pat saw the look on Bill’s face. ‘And don’t look like that,’ he snapped. ‘Better take them and be grateful than let the kids suffer. Pride and fine principals are all very well when you have plenty of money coming in.’

Bill felt ashamed, for he knew that Pat was only trying to be helpful. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘it’s just that neither Marion nor me envisaged going cap in hand to anyone.’

‘Well, we ain’t never been at war before, have we, and so we have to do the best we can.’

‘I know,’ said Bill, ‘but I don’t think there are words written that will ease any of this for Marion.’

Pat watched his brother-in-law trudge away from him, his head lowered and his shoulders hunched, and he didn’t envy him a bit. He and Polly had had a lot of knocks in their journey through life and he knew that she would view this as yet another challenge to overcome. After all, he reasoned, they wouldn’t be the only wives and mothers in the same situation.

Marion was in the scullery where she was rinsing out the boiler that she had used for the Monday wash. She looked up when she heard Bill and was slightly alarmed by the wretched look on his face. For a split second she thought that the army had refused him. That news would delight her, but she knew that it would devastate him and so she said, ‘Did everything go all right?’

Bill nodded. ‘I am to report on Wednesday for my medical and, provided I pass that, I will be in.’

Marion knew he would pass. Bill had always been a fit man.

‘Where are the children?’ he asked. ‘I need to talk to you.’

‘Sarah and Siobhan have taken the lot of them down the park,’ Marion said. ‘Talk away if you must, but I will have to get on …’

‘Marion, please.’ Bill placed his hands over Marion’s, which were reddened and still damp. ‘I need us both to sit down and talk.’

She looked into his troubled eyes and realised that she didn’t want to hear what he had to say. But that wouldn’t help, she knew, and so she followed him into the living room, where they sat on the two easy chairs in front of the range.

Knowing that there was no way of softening the blow, Bill said immediately, ‘When I decided to enlist, I knew that a soldier’s wages wouldn’t be near as much as I was earning, but I didn’t believe it would be so little.’

‘How little?’ Marion said in a steely voice, and as Bill told her he saw her large eyes widen in horrified surprise.

She wondered why she wasn’t shouting and screaming and throwing things about the room because it was what she really wanted to do. She also wanted to lash out at the husband she thought she knew and say it wasn’t to be borne that he could leave them almost destitute. But she did none of these things, because overriding her white-hot anger was the panicky thought that once he left there was a real risk of the family starving, or, at the very least, being put out of their house if she couldn’t raise the rent money.

‘So, I will have the princely sum of nine shillings and a penny to live on while you are away hunting down Germans?’ she spat.

‘I didn’t know,’ Bill said. ‘I had no idea that the wages or Separation Allowance would be so low. I would have thought that they would value our contribution to the army higher than that.’

‘Well, they don’t,’ Marion hissed. ‘And it might have been better for us all if you had made sure of the facts before you signed the forms.’

‘I know that,’ Bill said miserably. ‘I will send you what I can.’

‘Out of fourteen shillings a week?’ Marion said disparagingly. ‘With one shilling and eleven pence already taken out of your wages, and the money for the children and me as well? We might get short shrift if we relied on money from you to put food on the table.’

‘I know,’ Bill said. ‘And I’m sorry.’

‘Oh, that’s all right then, if you’re sorry,’ Marion said bitterly. ‘That will make a lot of bloody difference.’

The very fact that she had used an expletive at all, showed Bill the level of her distress. He tried to put his arms around her but she fought him off, for she heard the children coming in.

The following day Bill walked to the foundry with Richard to tell his gaffer what had transpired and to collect his wages, for they operated a week-inhand system, and also draw out any holiday money due to him. But he also wanted to snatch a private word with his son.

‘You’ll be the man of the house when I’m gone.’

‘I know, Dad,’ Richard said. ‘Don’t worry.’

‘It’s up to you to look after your mother,’ Bill went on. ‘Sarah will help you. She’s a good girl that way. And for God’s sake keep a weather eye on young Tony. There’s no real harm in him, but I know he’d go to hell and back to get into Jack’s good books.’

Richard knew that only too well. ‘I’ll do my best,’ he said. ‘But I’m at work all day.’

‘I know. And if he was at school all day I wouldn’t worry so much, but your mother says most of the teachers have gone with the evacuated children, so there will be no school until they have sorted something else for those left behind. And,’ Bill added with a wry smile, ‘idleness and therefore boredom can lead to all sorts of mischief.’

Richard nodded. ‘I know. And like I told you before, I’ll do my level best to help out.’

Bill felt much relieved because he knew that Richard could be trusted. They parted at the gates and Bill went to the wages office to get what was due to him, which amounted to nearly ten pounds. Which he gave straight to Marion.

‘Go easy with this,’ he warned her. ‘I don’t know how long it will take them to sort out your allowance. Once I’ve had the medical, providing that is all clear and everything, I’m not to report until Friday, and they might not put things in motion until it is sort of official.’

‘And what if they do take weeks to sort it out?’

‘They’d hardly do that,’ Bill said. ‘They’ll know you’ve all got to live. God knows, they are giving you little enough as it is.’

Marion gave a sigh. ‘Remember, I have tasted extreme poverty before and, I’d rather cut off my right arm than let my children suffer as I did throughout my childhood.’

Bill didn’t want that either, but he was utterly helpless to ease the predicament that he had put them in by enlisting. Pat didn’t seem to feel the gut-wrenching guilt Bill did, and Bill wished he could view life the same way, but he was made in a different mould entirely from Pat.

As Marion expected, Bill was passed as A1, fit to serve overseas. He was issued with a uniform and a kitbag, and had to report to Thorpe Street Barracks at seven o’clock on Friday morning.

She was surprised when he said that Pat had failed the medical. ‘Why?’ Marion said. ‘He looks all right to me.’

Bill shrugged. ‘I didn’t get to see him after,’ he said. ‘Folk that did said he was gutted.’

‘I wish it was you,’ Marion said.

‘God, don’t say that,’ Bill cried. ‘The man could have anything wrong with him.’

‘Huh, not Pat Reilly. The man is too pickled from alcohol for germs to live long on him. And now he’s somehow managed to wriggle out of the army. Well, I’m away to our Polly’s to find what that lying hypochondriac told them on the Medical Board so that they sent him home.’

The whole family got up to see Bill off that Friday. When he descended the stairs, dressed in his uniform, his wife and children assembled below thought they had never seen him look so smart. But, as Magda said to Missie later, ‘It didn’t look like our dad, though, did it?’

‘No, dain’t smell like him, either.’

‘Yeah, it was like kissing a stranger,’ Magda said.

For all that, they both cried bitterly when they did kiss Bill goodbye, though he kept assuring them that he’d be home again in a few weeks’ time.

Eventually they were calmer and when Magda said, ‘Are you calling for Uncle Pat?’ they were all surprised when he told them that their uncle had failed the medical.

‘Why?’ Tony asked. ‘Jack never said owt.’

‘Maybe he didn’t want to say,’ Bill said. ‘Maybe he didn’t know himself.’

‘But why did he fail, anyroad?’ Magda asked.

‘Ask no questions and you’ll be told no lies,’ Marion said.

Magda thought that just about headed a long list of annoying things mothers said. How were you to get to know anything if you didn’t ask questions? She didn’t bother asking again, though, because her mother could get right angry sometimes when she did that sort of thing. And that day she had two spots of colour on her cheeks, and her eyes looked very bright, which were two bad signs.

It was still very early, so when they had had their breakfast of bread and dripping and had a cat lick of a wash, they went out into the yard.

‘I can’t understand why our mom won’t say what’s wrong with Uncle Pat,’ Magda said.

‘Cos she’s a grown-up, that’s why,’ Tony said darkly. ‘And that’s what they do.’

Magda knew that, but Sarah was a different kettle of fish. She was almost fourteen and not yet a real adult, so she collared her in the bedroom later and said, ‘Why didn’t Uncle Pat get into the army, Sarah?’

‘Because he has flat feet.’

Missie and Tony were still in the yard, and when Magda went out and told them what Sarah had said they both looked at her in astonishment.

‘Don’t be daft!’ Tony said,

‘I’m not,’ Magda said indignantly. ‘That’s what Sarah said.’

‘It couldn’t be just that, though.’

Magda shrugged. ‘Well, that’s all she said.’ Then suddenly she sat down on the back step, where she unlaced her shoes and peeled off her socks.

‘What you doing?’ Missie cried.

‘Looking at my feet.’ Magda wriggled her toes. ‘All feet are sort of flat, aren’t they? I mean, you don’t get round feet or square or owt.’

‘Maybe Uncle Pat’s feet are dead flat all over,’ Missie said. ‘I mean, we wouldn’t see that through his boots.’

‘They ain’t,’ Tony put in. ‘I’ve seen Uncle Pat’s feet a few times and they looked the same as everyone else’s feet to me.’

‘Don’t stop him walking, does it?’ Magda said.

‘Shouldn’t stop him marching then, should it?’ Tony said. ‘Don’t think his feet can have much to do with it. Our Sarah must have picked it up wrong.’

The two girls nodded solemnly. It was easily done to get the wrong end of the stick, especially when you shouldn’t have overheard in the first place, as Magda knew to her cost.

‘You’d better put your things back on,’ Missie said, ‘before Mom catches sight of you.’

Magda pulled her socks on and pushed her feet into her shoes, but the laces defeated her and she had to leave them dangling. Fortunately, it was Sarah who came to bring the children inside and she only grumbled good-naturedly at Magda as she fastened up the shoes.

‘And let me straighten your hair before Mom sees it,’ she said. ‘How you get it in such a tangle in minutes beats me.’

‘I don’t know how I do it either,’ Magda said. ‘It’s a mystery.’

Sarah laughed at the crestfallen look on her young sister’s face. ‘Magda Whittaker, you are one on your own,’ she said as she rebraided one of Magda’s plaits. ‘And thank God for it.’

FIVE

Now that the twins had made their First Holy Communion, all the Whittakers went to Communion every Sunday. As no one was allowed to eat or drink beforehand, when they returned from Mass they were usually more than ready for a big feed. However, the first Sunday after Bill had left for the training camp there was no big breakfast. Instead, Marion made a big saucepan full of porridge. It was thin because it was made with water, and there was no jug of creamy milk to pour over it and just one small teaspoon of sugar each.

‘I’m still hungry,’ Tony declared as he cleared his plate.

Magda was as well, but again she had seen the two bright red spots appear in her mother’s cheeks. She was a great respecter of those spots because they would always appear before she got her legs smacked for something or other, so she waited to see what reaction Tony would get.

‘Well then,’ said Marion, ‘you will have to stay hungry until dinner time.’

‘Yeah, but—‘

‘If you have any more now you will have no appetite for dinner.’

‘Yeah I will, Mom,’ Tony cried. ‘Honest. I’m starving.’

‘Starving,’ snorted Marion. ‘You don’t even know what that word means. Anyway, there is no help for it and you will just have to make do with the porridge. No one else is making such a fuss.’

Oh, but I could, Magda thought, for I bet that I’m just as hungry as Tony. There was little point in saying any of this, though, and anyroad, her twin sister, Richard and Sarah seemed satisfied, and Sarah had already started clearing up the bowls.

Sarah could have said that the porridge barely took the edge off her appetite, but she knew that that was the type of meal that they had to get used to when so little money was coming into the house.

Later, in the yard, Magda said to Missie, ‘D’you suppose we’re poor now, ‘cos Mom only gave us two farthings for the collection instead of the two pennies we usually have?’

‘I don’t know if we’re really poor,’ Missie said, ‘but Sarah did tell me that there will be less money about now that Dad has enlisted.’ ‘Oh.’

‘She even said that some weeks we may get no collection money at all.’

‘Well, I’m going round Aunt Polly’s,’ Tony declared. ‘She’ll give me a jam piece or summat when I tell her that I’m still hungry.’

‘You can’t tell Aunt Polly that,’ Missie said, clearly shocked.

‘Why not?’ Tony demanded. ‘It’s the truth.’

‘Because Mom would be hurt if you did,’ Missie explained.

‘She wouldn’t half,’ Magda agreed. ‘Hurt and angry, I’d say. Anyroad, Tony, why d’you think that you’re the only one that’s still hungry? I am as well, if you want to know, but I don’t make as much fuss as you. It’ll be dinner time soon.’

‘Not for flipping hours it won’t.’

‘Oh, stop moaning. It’ll do no good.’

‘I wish Dad was here,’ Tony said wistfully. ‘If he took us down the park or summat I’d probably forget about being hungry.’

‘We all wish Daddy was here,’ Magda said. ‘But it ain’t no good going on about it.’

Tony sighed. Maybe there wasn’t, but there was no way that he was going to stay cooped up in the garden with his kid sisters. ‘Well, I ain’t staying here, anyroad,’ he said. ‘I’m off.’

‘Don’t you dare go to Aunt Polly’s.’

‘I ain’t,’ Tony said, because he knew Magda was right, his mother would be very angry should she find out that he had gone to his aunt’s house to be fed. He had no wish to cope with his mother’s temper as well as starvation. ‘I’m going to find our Jack and have a game of summat.’

When he had gone Magda said, ‘What shall we do? Shall I get our skipping ropes out?’

Missie made a face. Tm bored of skipping.’

‘Tell you what then, let’s see if we can throw two balls at the wall like our Sarah can?’

‘She can do three,’ Missie corrected. ‘I’ve seen her. I have trouble enough doing one.’

‘And me, but Sarah says practice makes perfect.’

‘If you like then,’ Missie said. ‘I don’t care what we do really.’

Magda sighed as she looked at her twin sister. ‘This is probably what being at war’s like,’ she said, ‘and our Sarah says we have to put up with it like everyone else.’

‘I know,’ Missie replied heavily. ‘It’s just everything’s so strange, and I do miss Daddy. But go and get the balls and we’ll see what we can play.’

However, the whole flavour of the day was wrong. Eventually the girls were called in for dinner. Magda sniffed because she loved the smells that would waft through from the kitchen on Sundays: the succulent aroma of a large piece of meat roasting slowly in the oven, surrounded by golden brown potatoes, and there might be apple crumble or treacle sponge bubbling away on the shelf below.

That day, however, she was in for an unpleasant shock for there was no roasting meat and golden brown potatoes and no pudding at all.

Marion didn’t know how long it would be before she had some more money coming in and she had been horrified at the price of meat, which had rocketed up since war had been declared, though no one could give a satisfactory reason as to why this was. So she made a casserole with a small piece of beef she had diced so that it would cook quicker and filled the pot with vegetables.

Usually, while the dinner was cooking Marion would be hard at it making pastries, pies and sponge cakes for Sunday tea, and by the time the dinner was ready there would normally be some of these cooling on wire trays. But Marion knew those teas would be a thing of the past. She had explained it all to her parents, though when she told them of the pittance that she was being given to feed the family they could understand that for themselves.

Everyone was too hungry to grumble about the casserole that day, though, and so they ate it without complaint.

Later Magda said to Missie, ‘It’s great that we haven’t got Grandma Murray to put up with today, ain’t it?’ Missie agreed it was and Magda went on, ‘Maybe Grandma and Granddad will never be able to come again. That would be even better.’

‘Not half,’ Missie agreed. ‘I don’t mind Granddad, though.’

‘I don’t either,’ Magda conceded. ‘He couldn’t come on his own, though. But what’s really smashing is the thought of never having to sit on that blooming horsehair sofa ever again.’

Bill Whittaker had been gone just over a week and they had just received the first letter from him, telling them how he’d settled down in the camp, when Polly came around with news of her own. Only the twins were in the house with their mother because Sarah was shopping and Tony playing out in the street.

‘Oh, Marion, what do you think?’ Aunt Polly said as she came in, her eyes aglow. ‘Our Pat has been offered a fine job at the munitions works at Witton and the wage is six pounds a week.’

Magda, glancing at her mother, knew that she wasn’t overpleased at Pat’s good fortune because her mouth had gone all tight. She shooed the girls into the garden but they lingered in the scullery.

‘I don’t understand why Mom’s so cross about Uncle Pat getting a job,’ Magda said in a low voice. ‘I mean, for years she has been moaning about the fact he doesn’t have one.’

Missie gave a little sigh. ‘I know. I think grownups are really confusing.’

‘Six pounds a week?’ they heard their mother exclaim. ‘What in God’s name does Pat know about making explosives?’

‘Enough, seemingly,’ Polly said. ‘Oh God, Marion, what does anyone know about anything these days? When did you think that you would ever see woman drivers and conductors on the trams, or working alongside men in the factories? The world has been turned on its head and I suppose Pat will be trained like all the rest. Anyroad,’ she added with a touch of pride, ‘they must think he had something about him because he only went for a job in the factory, like, and when he said as how he failed his medical to get in the army because of his flat feet they offered him the job as foreman.’

‘Sarah was right,’ Missie whispered. ‘It was just flat feet after all.’

‘Well, I hope it stays fine for you,’ the twins heard their mother say in a sort of clipped voice. Then she added, ‘Have you time to stay for a cup of tea?’

‘I shouldn’t,’ Polly said. ‘And I can’t stay too long, but I will have a quick cup because we haven’t had a good old natter for ages.’

‘Out, quick,’ Magda said, pushing Missie in front of her, and they escaped to the garden before their mother would catch them eavesdropping.

Later that night, when the house was still, Marion admitted to herself that she couldn’t be really happy for her sister’s good fortune, just incredibly envious. Polly had been poor all her married life and now she would have plenty of money, at least as long as the war lasted, while she, Marion, would have to scrimp and scrape. It was her husband who was putting his life on the line, not Polly’s. She found it very hard not to feel resentful.

Clara quite understood how Marion felt when she next came round.

‘It hardly seems fair that my Bill will soon be risking his life daily for a pittance,’ Marion said to her mother, ‘and because Pat Reilly is not fit for that, he’s sitting pretty and earning a wage many would give their eyeteeth for.’

‘I know,’ Clara said. ‘And all this came about because they said he had flat feet. I ask you! If they had refused him because he had chronic liver failure, I could have understood it more. Anyroad, Marion, just imagine how bad the others after jobs were for Pat Reilly to be the best of them.’

Marion gave a grim smile. ‘I thought that too.’

‘And, of course, Pat’s fine wages will do them no good at all,’ Clara said. ‘It will just dribble through Polly’s fingers.’

Marion thought that a little unfair, for Polly was always very good with money, but she didn’t say anything because for once her mother seemed to understand how aggrieved she had felt at her sister’s good fortune. ‘And just think, with extra money at his disposal, Pat Reilly could easily drink himself into an early grave. Mind you, in his case that could be a blessing.’

‘Oh, Mam!’ Marion said, shocked.

‘Don’t tell me you haven’t thought the same, for I’ll not believe it.’

A crimson flush flooded Marion’s face because her mother was right, though she felt so ashamed of it. ‘Bill always said there wasn’t that much wrong with Pat,’ she ventured.

‘There is a great deal wrong with a man who takes a young girl down and fills her belly every year without any idea how he is going to provide for any of his kids. They have lived like paupers.’

They had, as Marion knew only too well, so why then couldn’t she take joy in the fact that life was going to be easier for them from now on? That she couldn’t disturbed her because she realised she was not half as generous as her sister, who didn’t seem to have a resentful bone in her body.

As one week followed another no bombs fell and the only sign that Britain was at war at all was the news of ships being sunk, and everyone trying to cope with the blackout. Those who could, stayed indoors when darkness fell because to venture out was risking life and limb in such inky blackness.

The Government advised people to paint white lines on the kerbs outside their houses, and around any trees, pillar boxes and lampposts to try to cut down on the number of accidents.

‘It won’t work, of course,’ Polly said. ‘The white paint won’t show up in the pitch black any more than any other colour would.’

‘I know,’ Marion said. ‘It’s stupid, and so was sending the kids away when we’ve had no bombs. A lot of mothers like Phyllis Cox are bringing them back home.’

‘Don’t blame them.’

‘Nor do I. But I wish they would organise something for the children left behind. It does no good for kids to be hanging about all the time. It only leads to mischief when they have too much time on their hands.’

‘Oh, I’ll say so,’ Polly said. ‘Gladys Kent complained about our Jack only the other day. She has a house that opens on to the street and the little bugger tied her knocker in such a way that he could operate it from a distance. Course, when she tried to open the door she couldn’t. She said she knew it was him because she heard him killing himself laughing behind the wall.’

‘Was Tony involved as well?’

‘Think so.’

‘Why didn’t you come and tell me?’

‘It was only a prank, Marion,’ Polly said. ‘Pat gave them both a good talking to and they won’t do it again.’

‘I miss Bill for that,’ Marion said. ‘He was always so good with Tony over something like that. Mind, I miss Bill for more than just that, and though he includes postal orders in his letters he hasn’t much to spare either. I am so worried about money because it’s five weeks now since Bill left, with no sign of any Separation Allowance from the Government. Each morning when I wake I feel as if I’ve a lump of lead in my stomach when I think of the day ahead and trying to feed hungry children on a pittance. I mean, Bill left me ten pounds but twelve shillings a week for the rent makes a big hole in that.’

‘But there is no reason for you or the nippers to go without,’ Polly said. ‘I’ve told you many a time. We have the money now and, God knows, you’ve helped me and mine enough in the past. Why are you so pig-headed?’

‘Polly, if I had money from you, I haven’t the least idea when I would ever be able to pay you back.’

‘Have I ever asked for you to pay me back?’ Polly said, exasperated by her sister’s stubbornness.

‘I would have to pay you back,’ Marion said. ‘It’s the way I am.’

‘Have you managed to pay the rent?’

‘Marion made a face. ‘No, not for the last week I didn’t, and I can’t see it being any better this week, or next either.’

‘You’ll have to pay summat off soon,’ Polly warned. ‘Some of these landlords only give you three or four weeks, especially in posh houses like these.’

‘Polly, don’t you think that I’m not panic-stricken about just that?’ Marion snapped. ‘But I can’t magic money out of the air.’

‘Well,’ said Polly, ‘if you’re adamant that you won’t accept help from me, listen to this. I was talking to a woman down our yard and she said that her old man joined up in the spring because, like Pat, he hadn’t ever really had what you’d call regular work, and she told me that they dain’t get her Separation Allowance sorted out for over two months.’

‘Oh God!’ Marion cried. ‘If that happens to me I will be out on my ear. It would be the workhouse for the lot of us.’

‘Don’t be so bloody soft,’ Polly said. ‘Me and Pat would never let that happen to you or the nippers. Anyroad, what I’m trying to tell you is there is somewhere you can go, some organisation that helps in situations like this. This woman was telling me all about it, ‘cos she was on her beam ends, she said, and she had to go and see them.’

‘Beam ends,’ Marion said, ‘I know how that feels all right. And did this place help her?’

‘Yeah,’ Polly said. ‘You can’t go every week or owt to top up your Separation Allowance, for all you might need it, but if they are taking their time sorting out what you are due, they’ll help you. It’s called the SSAFA, which stands for Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Families Association and they have a big office place on Colmore Row. I’ll go with you tomorrow if you like.’

‘Oh, Polly, would you really?’

‘Course I would, you daft sod,’ Polly said cheerfully. ‘In things like this you are like a babe in arms, our Marion.’

Polly had advised her to take her marriage lines, the kids’ birth certificates and her rent book with her. ‘They don’t know who you are, do they?’ she said. ‘I mean, you could be just someone come in off the street trying to get money they ain’t entitled to.’

Marion knew that her sister was right. She took all the details of the Royal Warwickshires, the regiment in which Bill had enlisted, and even took the three letters that he had sent her from the training camp. A woman came out to see her where she waited on the wooden bench in the reception hall to which she had been directed, and Marion was a little unnerved by her smartness. She wore a pink, high-necked frilled blouse and navy skirt, proper silk seamed stockings and high-heeled navy shoes. She had also used cosmetics on her face and her light-coloured hair was gathered up in a very neat bun at the base of her neck. Marion followed her into a small office with some trepidation.

However, the woman’s eyes were kind and she was very understanding when Marion explained the difficulties she was having. When she had filled in the claim form she was awarded an interim payment of fifteen shillings to tide her over to the next week.

‘And then what?’ Marion asked.

‘If your Separation Allowance is not worked out by that time, you must come back,’ the woman said. ‘We will continue to help you till the Government steps in.’

‘I am most grateful.’

‘These are hard times for everyone,’ the woman said. ‘But the one thing many of our servicemen are worried about are the families they have left behind. We try to help to relieve some of that stress for you and your children, and also for your husband.’

‘She’s right as well, ain’t she?’ Polly said as they made their way home and Marion told her what the woman had said. ‘I think that our soldiers and sailors and that have enough to worry about facing the enemy without worrying about how their families are faring.’

Marion nodded. ‘And she was such a kind and sympathetic woman.’

‘Yeah,’ Polly said. ‘The bit I saw of her she seemed genuine enough, for all she was a bit posh, like. I think they’re all volunteers ? that’s what the woman down the yard said, anyroad. Too rich to need paying for a job like normal folk.’

‘I don’t care who they are,’ Marion said. ‘They have saved my bacon for this week at least, and some of this is going to pay off my rent arrears.’

‘Yeah, that’s sensible,’ Polly said. ‘But keep some back.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Marion said. ‘I need to buy coal – we’re nearly all out. I will give the rent man the least amount I can get away with.’

Despite the help Marion received from the SSAFA, the rent man pressed her for more money than she wanted to pay, and with the coal bought there was very little left.

‘Go back,’ Polly advised, when she popped around to see Marion. ‘Tell them what you had to pay out.’

Marion shook her head.’I couldn’t. I would be that ashamed, but I am down to my last shilling.’

‘Well,’ said Polly, ‘the only way to get quick cash is to pawn summat.’

Marion felt as if a lead weight had landed in the pit of her stomach and she remembered her boast that she had never crossed the doorstep of a pawnbroker’s. She felt tears of shame and humiliation prickle the back of her eyes but she brushed them away impatiently. There was no allowing herself the luxury of tears.

‘And what should I pawn?’ she asked.

‘Well, you can start with the old man’s clothes,’ Polly said. ‘Most women in your position would have pawned his suit before he’d passed the end of the street.’

Marion was aghast. ‘I can’t do that.’

‘Course you can,’ Polly said dismissively. ‘He’ll not be wanting his stuff at the Front, will he? Anyroad, it’s his fault that you’re in this mess.’

Marion remembered the day that Bill had bought that suit. In the Bull Ring a two-piece suit cost two guineas; a three-piece, two pounds and ten shillings.

‘He wanted the waistcoat so that he could wear his watch,’ Marion told Polly, laying it out on the bed.

Polly extracted the watch from the waistcoat pocket. ‘Good watch, that.’

‘It’s gold,’ Marion said. ‘It was Bill’s father’s and Bill is almighty fond of it.’

Polly shrugged. ‘Might have to go despite that,’ she said. ‘But it would be better to take that in on its own, not mixed in with a pile of clothes. That way you’ll probably get more for it. Now, what about his second-best suit that this one replaced?’

‘No,’ Marion said. ‘I was going to cut it down for Richard – he’s fast growing out of the one he has now – and any extra material I was going to save to patch Tony’s trousers. He goes through the seat of those more often than I have hot dinners, and I’ll not send him to school like some poor souls with their bottoms nearly exposed.’

‘All right, we’ll leave the second-best suit and the watch for now,’ Polly said, pulling out more of Bill’s clothes to lay on the bed.’This is a sizeable bundle anyway.’

‘I’m really nervous,’ Marion said.’I’ve never been in a pawnbroker’s before.’

‘You’re luckier than most round these doors then.’

‘Not these doors,’ Marion corrected.’You never see anyone here taking a bundle to be pawned on Monday morning.’

‘Yeah, well, maybe none of their husbands thought it their duty to fight for King and Country to try and protect the rest of us,’ Polly said.’And while they’re doing that the bloody Government think a few measly shillings a week is all a woman needs to feed and clothe her family and keep them warm.

‘Now,’ Polly said as the two women left the house, ‘I usually go to Sarah Moore, but she can be a mean bugger, so we’ll try Jones on the corners of Wheeler Street and Clifford Street. He’s a bit stern-looking ? is a retired JP, I heard – but he is fair.’

Marion had always had an assumption that pawn shops were dark and rather seedy places but she was pleasantly surprised because Jones looked quite respectable from the outside. She had a surreptitious look round to see if anyone she knew was watching her before she went in the door, feeling sick to her soul that she had to part with Bill’s clothes in such a way in order for them all to survive.

Despite this, though, she thought the inside of the shop had an air of respectability about it and this was compounded by the very smart and erect white-haired gentleman who came to attend to them. As Polly had said, he was rather severe-looking, but his voice and manner were pleasant enough.

On the way down to the shop Polly had warned Marion what to expect, and Jones did just as she said and examined each article with a disparaging look on his face. Then he rubbed the material of the suit between his finger and thumb, and though he said nothing, by the look on his face Marion knew he didn’t think much of it.

‘I’ll give you ten shillings for the lot,’ he said eventually.

Polly gave a toss of her head. ‘Don’t make me laugh,’ she said. ‘That bundle is well worth a pound and you know it.’

‘They will be left on my hands,’ Jones complained.

‘That’s your business,’ Polly said. ‘I don’t care whether they are left on your hands or not. You are not getting a bundle like that for ten shillings.’

‘Well, I will not pay as much as a pound,’ Jones said. ‘Shall we split the difference and I will give you fifteen shillings? You can’t say fairer than that.’

‘Yes, I can,’ Polly said. ‘Seventeen shillings and sixpence and the bundle’s yours. That’s all I will settle for.’

Jones sighed heavily.’You will have me robbed between you all,’ he said, but he went to the till as he spoke and wrote out the pawn ticket.

‘It’s all a bit of a game to them,’ Polly said to Marion, as they walked away from the shop. ‘Their aim is to give you as little as they possibly can for what you are trying to pawn. Course, if you pawn your old man’s suit every Monday, like lots of women do round here, then you know what you will be offered for it, but with something like your bundle today, when he said ten shillings, I know that it was worth more than twice that amount.’

‘He still gave you only seventeen and six, though.’

‘I know,’ Polly said. ‘And I knew as well that that was as high as he was prepared to go and we’d have likely got less at Sarah Moore’s.’

Marion sighed. ‘It seems a terrible way to have to go on.’

Polly, catching sight of her sister’s face and hearing the despondency in her voice, knew just how bad she was feeling, and she said gently, ‘What you did today, Marion, some women have been doing for years because it’s the only way of surviving.’

‘I know,’ Marion cried. ‘I really do understand that. It’s just …’

Polly laid a hand on her arm. ‘Let’s see what bargains are going in the Bull Ring, shall we? At least you have money enough for now.’

Marion managed to buy two bowls of faggots and peas to share between them all, which cost her a shilling, spent another sixpence on potatoes to go with them, nine pence on a loaf for the morning, and still had money left for the rest of the week. She’d also be able to pay more off the rent arrears and she felt light-hearted with relief as she and Polly made their way home.

Later, sitting in Marion’s kitchen with a cup of tea, Polly said, ‘When Pat got that job in the munitions I was that proud. When he couldn’t even get into the army he took it bad. Now he’s doing a job that is well paid and he feels he’s doing his bit as well.’

‘Is that important to him?’

‘Oh, yes. Of course, it’s a novelty to have money in my purse and I’d be lying if I said the money didn’t matter, but for Pat it means more than that. He said to me that he feels proud to earn the wage that he picks up at the end of the week. It’s what he has wanted to do for years.’

Marion remembered laughing with her mother about Pat getting the job in the first place and saying he would drink himself to death with the extra money he would have in his pocket, but there had been no evidence of that, and she felt guilty that she made fun of him over the years. If she was honest, even though she helped Polly out financially, in a way she did it as a kind of looking down on her and Pat, and that was why she balked at the suggestion of accepting money from them. Whatever reason she gave Polly, the real one was because the tables would be turned completely and she couldn’t really have borne that.

‘You never understood Pat,’ Polly went on, adding sadly, ‘and you never really gave him a chance. It was true that he couldn’t provide for me, but then neither could many other men.’

‘It was that he used to drink. Even when you had no money he would drink,’ Marion said. ‘I could never understand that.’

‘When you think what some of the poor sods have to come home to, it’s no wonder they linger in the pub,’ Polly said. ‘But then you see the other side of the coin – what some of the wives and children have to put up with … Don’t glare at me like that, our Marion, because Pat was never like that. Yes, he would go to the pub, but only once a week, and all he had in his pocket was just enough money for one pint of ale.’

Marion felt a little chastened by Polly’s words and she remembered that Bill had always said something similar about Pat. But however she felt about him, it would do no good running him down in front of her sister.

‘Pat tried so hard to get work that he used to wear his boots down to the uppers. I had to insist that he took a couple of pennies for himself, and he never would have more than that. He gave up the cigarettes years ago. He ain’t a bad man, Marion, though he may sometimes be foolish, but then, God knows, few of us can put up our hands and say we are always so wise and sensible.’

‘I’m sorry, Polly, and you’re right,’ Marion said contritely. ‘I didn’t fully understand your situation and I have never really let myself get to know Pat. My view of him was coloured by that day that you came to seek me out to tell me you were expecting.’

Polly was never one to bear a grudge, and she said, ‘In a way I can understand it. You were my big sister and you used to look out for me. A forced marriage to one of the infamous Reillys was not what you wanted for me.’

‘No,’ Marion admitted, ‘but Bill once said to me that Pat made you happy and that is what I wanted for you so I should have been a lot more understanding.’

She knew that Pat Reilly and his lax attitudes might still irritate her at times but he had been kindness itself since Bill enlisted. She vowed she would try harder to be more tolerant and certainly not carry tales back to her mother.

‘The point is,’ said Polly, ‘when the boot was on the other foot and you had the money, you were always very good with me – with all of us ? but now you’re too stiff-necked to let me help you.’

‘You are helping me,’ said Marion with a wry smile. ‘On my own I would never have got seventeen and sixpence for that bundle of clothes,’ and the two women burst out laughing.

SIX

As November loomed, Marion’s Separation Allowance was eventually worked out, and though the back pay was an added bonus, she knew that the normal weekly allowance would buy little but food for them all, and it didn’t even pay the rent. Buying coal, which became more necessary as the days grew colder, was a constant headache, not to mention footwear for them all.

The evacuated children began filtering back home and, to Marion’s grateful relief and that of many more mothers, the schools reopened. Marion didn’t bother sending Sarah, who would have been leaving at Christmas anyway. Mrs Jenkins at the corner shop was looking for a girl to train up, and though the wages were only eight shillings, Sarah was anxious to take it, knowing even the small amount that she would be able to tip up would be welcomed.

First, though, despite the fact that she would be wearing an overall in the shop, Marion felt Sarah had to have at least a couple of dresses that fitted her because she had developed a bust as she passed her fourteenth birthday and some of her dresses now strained to fasten and were decidedly skimpy. Richard’s boots, too, needed cobbling again as they were leaking. He had to travel to work each day on the tram and Marion knew it would help none of them if he was to take sick because of his inadequate clothing.

She went to the Rag Market in the Bull Ring for the things she needed for the children, but even paying Rag Market prices left a sizeable hole in the backdated allowance, and she had nothing left for the twins or Tony, not if she were to pay the rent, though the younger children had all been complaining that their feet hurt.

The children’s shoes were so tight that when they got to school they removed them, like many others. When the man came round from the Christmas Tree Fund, when they had been back at school only a few days, he gave them a docket for new boots and socks to collect from Sheepcote Road Clinic. Marion was mortified by shame when the children came home from school and told her this. She tried to be grateful but she only felt degraded that she wasn’t able to provide for her own children, and this feeling intensified when she was also given a jersey and trousers for Tony, and skirts and jerseys for the two girls.

This is what it is to be poor, she thought that night as she lay in bed. She remembered with remorse how she had looked down on Polly for years. Now she was in the same boat herself and she knew the children needed the things too much for her to refuse them.

Neither Marion nor her sister envied Sarah working for Mrs Jenkins, who was known as a mean and nasty old woman. Her character was apparent in her thin lips, though her face was plump. There were plenty of lines of discontent on it, and the powder she obviously applied in the morning lay in the folds of her skin by afternoon. Her hair was piled untidily on her head, but her glittering eyes were as cold as ice and so was her thin nasal voice.

‘Wouldn’t give you as much as the skin off a rice pudding,’ Polly said one Saturday afternoon when Sarah arrived home after she had been working at the corner shop a fortnight. But Sarah knew one of the reasons Polly said that was because Mrs Jenkins wouldn’t allow people to put things on the slate and pay at the end of the week. She had made it plain to Sarah when she arrived.

‘Now I don’t want you to stand any nonsense,’ she’d said, looming closer so that Sarah’s face was inches from her and she smelled the stale smell of her and saw rotting teeth in her mouth. ‘If they don’t have the money then they don’t get the goods. Point out the notice to them if they object.’ There was the notice, stuck on the wall behind the till: ‘Don’t ask for credit for refusal often offends.’

When Sarah told her aunt this, she snorted in contempt. ‘Stingy old bugger,’ she said. ‘And your mom tells me that although Mrs Jenkins pays you only eight shillings she don’t throw a few groceries in as well to make it up, like.’

Sarah laughed. ‘Oh, Aunt Polly, you must be joking,’ she said. ‘I’m not even allowed to take home the odd cracked egg or stale buns at the end of the day.’

‘I can’t understand the woman at all,’ Polly said, shaking her head. ‘Do you serve in the shop all day?’

‘No,’ Sarah said. ‘My first job when I go in is to bag things up in the storeroom upstairs and send them down the chute to the shop.’

‘Like sugar and that?’

Sarah nodded. ‘And flour, tea and mixed fruit, raisins and that, and anything else Mrs Jenkins wants me to weigh up. She says there’s rationing coming in January so things might be different then, and it might not be so easy to have things under the counter for favoured customers.’

‘I’d say not,’ Marion said. ‘Course, it all depends what’s being rationed.’

‘So do you like the job?’ Polly persisted. ‘Because I heard the last girl left in a tear.’

‘Well, I won’t,’ Sarah said. ‘We need the money too much.’

Neither Polly or Marion argued with that because they knew Sarah was right.

Sarah didn’t moan much, but she did find Mrs Jenkins hard going, and her grating, complaining voice really got on Sarah’s nerves. And Aunt Polly was right: Mrs Jenkins was incredibly mean. She’d give her a cup of weak tea mid-morning, usually when she had finished the bagging up, and another mid-afternoon, but she had to drink these on the shop floor because as soon as she was in the shop Mrs Jenkins made herself scarce. She even seemed to begrudge her the half an hour she gave her to eat the sandwiches Marion put up for her, and there was no cup of tea made then so Sarah usually washed them down with water. However, a job was a job and she thought this would do until something better turned up.

The only cheering thing was that the Government had relaxed the blackout restrictions a little because so many people had been injured or even killed in accidents on the road. Shielded lights on cars were now allowed, and so were shaded torches. It was immensely comforting to have that small pencil of light to guide a person’s way in that dense inky blackness. That was, of course, if batteries could be obtained, for they disappeared from shops quicker than the speed of light.

But then none of this mattered because Bill was coming home on leave. Marion could hardly wait to see him. In a way it was a bittersweet pleasure, because she knew that it was without doubt embarkation leave, and that when he returned he would more than likely be sent overseas to join in the war already claiming many, many lives.

When he arrived that cold, foggy Saturday he was shocked by the state of his family. He noted how thin and pasty-looking the children were, but when he drew Marion into his arms and he could feel her bones, he was shocked to the core.

Marion had a stew ready, made with cow’s heel and vegetables, and because it was Bill’s first night home they were all allowed bread to mop up the gravy, a luxury Marion couldn’t usually allow.

Tony finished his helping, sat back in his chair and said with a sigh of contentment, ‘Crikey, I’d forgotten what it was like to feel really full.’

Tony’s words made Bill feel even worse, and that night in bed beside his wife he said, ‘God, Marion, I am so sorry. I had no idea that you were suffering this way.’

Marion couldn’t reassure Bill and tell him that everything was all right, and yet she felt that she couldn’t berate him either. She wasn’t stupid and she knew that when Bill left her he would be exposed to God alone knew what danger, and she couldn’t let him do that with any angry words that she had thrown at him ringing in his ears. And so she said, ‘We will likely manage well enough if the war doesn’t go on too long.’

‘I hope it doesn’t,’ Bill said. ‘I imagine we’ll be over in France soon and then we’ll know what’s what, and soon have Jerry on the run.’

Marion gave a sudden shiver at Bill’s word and he put his arms around her and held her tight, glad that the bolster had been removed from the bed. Not that he would ever go further than a cuddle, however much he might want to. The doctor had warned him about the danger of another pregnancy after the twins had struggled to be born, and he loved his wife too much to put her at risk. He wasn’t some sex-crazed beast, but to cuddle together was nice and comforting for both of them.

Bill wore his uniform to Mass the next morning as it was the only clothes he had left, but he soon saw that he wasn’t the only one. He found that people respected the uniform and his hand was wrung many times, including by Father McIntyre.

Back home, he ate the thin porridge with everyone else and though he could have eaten three times that amount and still been peckish, he wouldn’t let Marion offer him anything else. After it, to take their mind off how hungry they still were, he suggested taking Tony and the twins down to the canal.

‘Don’t be too long,’ Marion told Bill. ‘I want dinner fairly early because my parents are coming afterwards to see you and they won’t want to go home in the dark.’ She saw his eyes widen and said, ‘They’re not coming for a meal. It takes every penny I have to feed my own. Those fancy Sunday teas are a thing of the past, as I said in my letters to you.’

Bill had no desire to see Clara, but he nodded. ‘We’ll be back in plenty of time.’

The children thoroughly enjoyed having their father back. Tony in particular had really missed him, and in his company he forgot his growling stomach, and the cold of the day, which caused wispy white trails to escape from their mouths when they spoke.

They all knew they were having liver for dinner because Aunt Polly had brought it round the previous day. She’d said the butcher had some going cheap and so she’d bought extra for them.

‘What we eat is sort of hit and miss,’ Marion had told Bill when he’d asked how they were managing. ‘You go to the Bull Ring on Saturday night and buy what is cheap because they are trying to get rid of it. But now Polly has brought liver that’s what we’ll eat.’

‘But I thought Tony and the twins, Magda in particular, hate liver.’

‘Huh,’ said Marion grimly. ‘It’s amazing what you can develop a taste for if the alternative is starving. None of the children can afford to be fussy these days.’

And they weren’t. Bill saw that every plate was soon cleaned.

They had barely washed up before Clara and Eddie Murray were at the door. Eddie was quick to shake Bill’s hand, say he was glad to see him and remarked on how well he was looking. Clara, however, barely returned his greeting before launching into him.

‘Your selfishness in enlisting has reduced your family to penury. They scarcely have enough to live on. You must have noticed how skinny they all are.’

Bill didn’t need it pointing out to him, but Marion was well aware of how he was feeling and she was annoyed with her mother.

‘This really isn’t the time to go into this, Mammy,’ she said. ‘Bill can do nothing now to ease the situation and he just has a couple of days at home. The time for any recriminations at all is well past.’

‘Well said,’ Eddie told his daughter approvingly, and to Bill he said, ‘Shall we leave them to chat and I’ll treat you to a pint? Then you can tell me all about life in the army.’

Bill was glad to get away from the malicious eyes of his mother-in-law. The children wished they could go too, but they had to stay and talk to their grandmother, though most of her conversation was criticising and finding fault with what they said and did.

In the convivial pub, where Bill was greeted by many, Eddie waited until their pints were in front of them before saying, ‘Tell me how life is treating you?’

Bill told him all about the training camp and what he had to do, and Eddie listened with interest.

‘And I suppose the training is over now and this is embarkation leave?’ Eddie asked finally.

‘I imagine so,’ Bill said, ‘though they tell us nothing definite. To be honest it’s the family I worry about. What Clara said today, well, she was right, because I was shocked at the state of them when I came home. Marion made this stew for us all and afterwards young Tony said he had forgotten what it was like to feel full. And you know why that was? It was because, in honour of my coming home, Marion had allowed them bread to mop up the gravy. Usually she can’t afford to do that.’

‘Things have been hard for her,’ Eddie said. ‘Hard for all the wives of servicemen, especially if they’re mothers too, like the vast majority are.’

‘I feel so helpless,’ Bill said. ‘That’s what’s so hard.’

‘Seems to me all that you can do is get over there and finish this war just as soon as you can so life can get back to normal again,’ Eddie said.

Bill smiled wryly. ‘I’ll do my best. As for the family, I saved my cigarette money and had thought to take them to the music hall or cinema for a treat, but I know now a few good feeds is what they really want. Tomorrow early I’m going to the shop to buy extra sugar and full-cream milk for their porridge, and I’ll treat them to a fish-and-chip dinner tomorrow evening. Anything I have got left over I’ll give Marion before I leave.’

‘I would say that they’ll be grateful for that,’ Eddie said.

And they were pleased with the extra sugar and milk on their porridge before they left for school and work the next day.

Bill was shocked to see the younger children dressed in clothes and boots provided by the Christmas Tree Fund, this stamped on them so that they couldn’t be pawned, and he felt shame steal all over him.

Marion saw his face and guessed his feelings. When the children had gone, she said, ‘I felt the same way at the time, and wished that I could have refused them. But how could I have done that? You should see the state of some of their other things, and their warm clothes from last winter won’t go near them now.’

‘I just wish I could make things easier for you,’ Bill said.

‘There is no way you can,’ Marion replied.

Bill nodded miserably. ‘There is one thing I can do to put a smile on their faces.’

‘What?’

‘I intend to buy fish and chips for us all this evening.’

Marion felt her mouth watering at the thought. ‘Oh, Bill, you couldn’t buy anything that would please them more. They’ll think they have died and gone to heaven, so they will. You just wait and see when you tell them that tonight.’

And Bill did see. The children were almost speechless with pleasure. And later he watched them devouring the meal with such relish it brought tears to his eyes.

A couple of days after Bill had left, Polly said to her sister, ‘Look, Marion, if you won’t take any money off me then at least let Tony and the twins come to our house dinner time for a bite to eat. You and all, if you want.’

Marion hesitated and Polly said, ‘Go on, Marion. Don’t be so stiff-necked.’

Marion knew Polly could afford to give the children something wholesome. Then bread and scrape for tea, and thin porridge for breakfast would matter less. On the other hand rationing was coming in soon and everyone would get only so much. ‘It wouldn’t be fair to take yours,’ she said.

‘We don’t know what’s going to be rationed yet,’ Polly pointed out. ‘We’ll have to wait and see. But now Pat, the boys and Mary Ellen eat their dinners in their works’ canteens and so I’ll save on any rations they would eat.’

‘All right,’ Marion said. ‘Thank you, Polly. We’ll see how it goes. But you just see to the children. I’ll get something for myself.’

Polly knew she probably wouldn’t. She ate not nearly enough, in her sister’s opinion, but at least Polly could ensure that the children were well fed once a day.

The children were delighted when Marion told them they would be having dinner at their Auntie Polly’s. They all loved her crowded and untidy house. Aunt Polly wasn’t one to be always on about people washing their hands either, and as there were barely enough chairs to sit down at the table, which was mostly cluttered anyway, they usually stood around with food in their hands, which the Whittaker children thought wonderful.

‘The only downside to all this,’ Marion said to Sarah one evening when the younger ones were in bed, ‘is that Tony sees even more of Jack.’

‘Jack isn’t that bad,’ Sarah protested.

Marion shook her head. ‘I’m worried about Tony and the power Jack seems to have over him. I’m very much afraid our Tony needs a father’s hand to stop him going to the bad altogether.’

In a way she was right, because Tony missed his father so much it was like an ache inside him. Richard, sitting in Bill’s chair when he came in from work and rustling the paper he often bought on the way home, as his father had, just annoyed Tony more and he tended to gravitate more to his uncle Pat and envied Jack that his father came home each night.

In fact, he envied Jack for many things, not least because he could think up such exciting things to do. When Tony was with him and up to some mischief or other, he didn’t miss his father half as much.

At some point, most boys tried to hitch a ride on a horse-drawn dray, and Jack and Tony had done so many times. The journeys never lasted long because the driver was either aware they were there or a passer-by would alert him. ‘Oi, put yer whip be’ind,’ they would shout, and any clinging boy would drop swiftly from the cart before the driver’s curling whip could bite into his skin.

However, when Jack suggested doing the same to a clattering swaying tram Tony thought it the most exciting thing he had ever done. Neither the conductor nor the driver noticed them, but they were thrown off into the road when the tram took a corner at speed and they narrowly missed being crushed to death by a delivery van, whose driver swerved just in time to avoid them.

Marion was told this by the policeman who delivered the shamefaced and tearful Tony home, but his contriteness was wasted on her when the policeman told her that the delivery driver might never be the same again. After hauling her son inside, she paddled his bottom with a hairbrush and wished she could administer the same punishment to her nephew.

All the other children were shocked at what Tony had done and both Richard and Sarah told him so.

‘Haven’t you got a brain in that bonehead of yours?’ Sarah railed at him. ‘Didn’t you think for one minute what a stupid idea it was?’

Tony was silent. He was feeling incredibly miserable. His bottom felt as if it was on fire and his stomach yawned emptily, for he had been sent to bed without anything to eat. It hadn’t seemed stupid when Jack suggested it. It had seemed daring, and that’s what he tried to tell his sister. Sarah looked at his brick-red face and his eyes still so full of tears that his voice was broken and husky but she felt no sympathy for him.

‘Well, that one daring act might have cost you your life,’ she cried, and added witheringly, ‘Oh, you must be very proud of yourself.’

‘I ain’t,’ Tony sniffed. ‘I never said I was proud of it. I just thought it would be a bit of fun.’

‘Fun!’ Sarah repeated as if she couldn’t believe she had heard right. ‘Well, do you realise that you have probably cost that van driver his job? He more than likely has a wife and children dependent on him and, according to what the policeman told Mom, he might never be able to drive again. So you think on that, Tony Whittaker.’

Tony did think about it, though he couldn’t help wondering what Jack felt about it all now. He knew that his family would probably not be half as harsh with him. Uncle Pat might even laugh at his antics. He often did. That was always a great puzzle to Tony.

The thin porridge the next morning didn’t even go part way to assuaging his appetite but he did feel ashamed when he noticed lines of strain on his mother’s face that he had never seen before.

‘I have enough to worry about as it is, with your dad away and us barely having enough to live on,’ Marion said to him as she cleared away his bowl. ‘You can at least try to be good and listen more to me and less to Jack Reilly.’

‘I’m sorry, Mom,’ Tony said sincerely. ‘It was just a lark but I won’t do it again.’

‘See you don’t then,’ Marion said grimly. ‘You could have been killed.’

‘I know. I really am sorry.’

‘All right then,’ Marian said, mollified a little. ‘We’ll say no more about it.’

Jack and Tony gave trams a wide berth after that little episode. It had given them quite a scare, not that either of them ever admitted that.

Marion opened the door the following Saturday morning to see the priest, Father McIntyre, on the doorstep. She was a little flustered because she hadn’t been expecting him, but she smiled and said, ‘This is a surprise, Father. Come away in and I’ll put the kettle on.’

‘No, Marion,’ the priest said stiffly. ‘This isn’t a social call.’

‘Oh?’ Marion felt her stomach sink as she looked at the priest’s disgruntled face and suddenly she knew that her younger son had something to do with Father McIntyre’s ill humour. Jack and Tony, like most Catholic boys of their age, had been trained to serve at Mass, and they should both have been serving at early Mass that morning. ‘Did the boys not turn up, Father?’ Marion asked anxiously.

‘Oh, they were there, all right,’ the priest said. ‘And afterwards showed total disrespect for the Church and the sacrament they had just taken part in.’

‘What did they do, Father?’ Marion asked fearfully.

‘They each had a water pistol and I caught them filling them up from the holy water font.’

‘Oh, Father!’ cried Marion, shocked. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘It’s not your place to be sorry,’ the priest said. ‘It’s up to your son to be sorry and mend his ways. Jack Reilly admitted that both pistols were his and that he had given one to Tony.’

‘Somehow Tony seems to lose all sense of right and wrong when he’s with that boy,’ Marion said. ‘I will deal with him, Father never fear. Where is he?’

‘Knowing that your husband is away, I have taken them both to Pat Reilly’s house to let him deal with the pair of them.’

‘Thank you, Father,’ Marion said. ‘I will be away now to fetch Tony home.’

And she did fetch him and berated him every step of the way. That night she wrote to tell Bill all about his recalcitrant son.

Not surprisingly, Pat didn’t take it at all seriously. Do you know, he even asked the boys if they had chosen holy water because it improved their aim …

Bill smiled when he read that because he could well imagine Pat saying it, and knew he himself would have taken the same line and viewed it for what it was, a boyhood prank. He also knew that Marion would never see it like that. She was really upset over it.

How is Jack to grow up with any sort of moral fibre with a father like that one as an example? And whatever mischief he is at, Tony is right behind him. I cannot seem to keep any sort of check on him and never know what he might be up to next.

A week after the last upset with Tony, Marion pawned the silver locket Bill had bought her the year after they were married and the delicate chiming carriage clock that had been Lady Amelia’s present to her when she’d left service to marry Bill. It had pride of place on the mantelpiece in the parlour for it was easily the most beautiful thing the family owned. Marion shed bitter tears when she was alone for she hated having to part with such treasured items.

Sarah missed the clock almost straight away, but she said nothing because she could see from her mother’s sad face and woebegone eyes that she was heart sore that she’d had to take it to the pawnbroker. When her grandparents had been coming to tea every Sunday, one of the jobs that Sarah did on a Saturday was to dust the parlour. She used to dust that clock with very great care indeed, always afraid that she might drop it or damage it in some other way. Now she thought the mantelpiece looked terribly bare without it.

And so it did, but Marion needed the money. She was a week behind with the rent again, badly needed coal, and she would liked to have her leaky boots resoled. Also she wanted to pick up a trinket for the children for Christmas, which was only two weeks away. She knew that it would be a poor one for the family this year, with no presents and nothing in the way of festive food either. She made a bit of an effort, though, and brought the little Christmas tree down from the loft, and hung around the garlands the children had made over the years.

Sarah knew the twins still firmly believed in Santa Claus, though she wasn’t sure about Tony, and she thought she had better warn them about the lack of presents. ‘Santa won’t be visiting us this year,’ she told them one evening.

They all looked at her in amazement. Tony wasn’t sure that he believed in Santa any more. Jack said it was eyewash and it was just your parents filled your stockings and that, but though he usually accepted everything Jack said as gospel truth, Tony had held on to the belief that this time he was wrong and that his bulging stockings of the past had been filled by a genial man in a red suit and sporting a long white beard.

At Sarah’s words he saw at once that that wasn’t so. Jack had been right all along and that the hunting knife that he had coveted for so long would not be in his possession by Boxing Day, this year anyway.

‘Why ever not?’ asked Magda.

‘It’s because of the war,’ Sarah said.

Magda and Missie looked at one another. They knew all about the war, but that surely had nothing to do with Santa. ‘What about the war?’

‘Well, if he set off with a sleigh full of toys the Germans could capture him,’ Sarah said.

The twins’ mouths dropped agape at that terribly shocking news. They knew how horrid the Germans were because the adults were always talking about it and what they got up to, and the girls often saw the headlines of newspapers on their way to school. So Santa in German hands didn’t bear thinking about. What if they hurt him, killed him, even? Magda thought she wouldn’t put it past them. They were as bad as it was possible to be.

So when Sarah said, ‘He thought this year he is safer staying where he is at the North Pole,’ the twins nodded solemnly. They were disappointed, but keeping Santa safe was paramount in their minds.

SEVEN

Marion had in the end taken the five shillings that Polly had pressed upon her so that the children could eat well on Christmas Day. To give the twins at least something to open Christmas morning she also got the two girls a couple of wind-up toys from a man in the Bull Ring selling them from a tray round his neck, but she could find nothing for Tony, and neither could Sarah and Richard. They all felt bad about that.

Then after breakfast on Christmas Day, Richard dropped a cloth bag into his young brother’s hands. ‘Happy Christmas, Tony.’

Tony’s mouth dropped open with astonishment. ‘Your marble collection,’ he said with awe, his voice choked with emotion, because it was the one thing that he had coveted for ages, which Richard would never let him touch.

Richard knew better than to comment on Tony’s reaction and instead he said almost nonchalantly, ‘You may as well have them. I never play with them any more.’

Tony tipped them out onto the table and examined them. He knew he’d be the envy of his friends when he hit the streets with those. Not even Jack had so many, or such fine ones.

‘Thanks, Richard,’ he said. ‘I’ll take real good care of them.’

Marion was glad that for Tony and the twins, a little magic of the day was retained.

After dinner Polly came around with a bundle of clothes for them all. She had a warm coat for Tony that she said was an old one of Jack’s, but Marion had never seen Jack wearing anything like it and it was rather big for Tony. However, before she was able to say anything at all, Tony exclaimed in delight and put it on, very glad to have it because the only coat that fitted him was very thin and did nothing to keep the cold out.

‘This is great,’ he said, and Marion saw his eyes were shining so, though her eyes met her sister’s over Tony’s head, she said nothing.

There were also scarves, gloves and smart berets for the twins, and a smart cap with ear flaps, the same brown as the coat, for Tony. Polly even had a couple of dresses and a cardigan for Marion she said she had no use for. Marion was moved to tears by her sister’s kindness and generosity. When she tried to say this, however, Polly waved her thanks away almost impatiently.

‘Think nothing of it. How many times did you help me out?’

‘That was nothing,’ Marion said. ‘It was just a bit and, anyway, I didn’t do it so you would feel you had to pay it back.’

‘And I didn’t do it for that, like a kind of duty,’ Polly said. ‘You made life much more comfortable for me and mine for years and years.’ She put her hand over Marion’s. ‘Now, through no fault of yours or mine, the positions have reversed a bit. It pleases me to be able to help you. Let me do it while I have the means to do so.’

Marion couldn’t speak, the lump in her throat was too large, and tears trickled down her cheeks.

Polly stood up, jerked Marion to her feet and put her arms around her. ‘Come here, you silly sod,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t be crying on Christmas Day.’

Marion made a valiant effort and wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her cardigan. ‘I know I shouldn’t, but it’s made me feel … I don’t really know … Anyway, Happy Christmas, Polly.’

‘And to you,’ Polly said, and her smile seemed to light up her whole face.

Marion thought that although that Christmas was one of the poorest she had ever spent, because of Polly and her kindness she felt suddenly filled with warmth and happiness.

The year turned, though Marion had no great hope that 1940 would be any better than 1939. All they had to look forward to was rationing starting on 8 January.

‘We’ll have to register with a grocer and a butcher,’ Marion told Polly. ‘Everyone gets a ration book, even the nippers.’

‘Well, that’s not that surprising, is it?’ Polly said. ‘I mean, the smallest has to eat.’

‘Well, they won’t get much on the ration,’ Marion said. ‘It’s only bacon, butter and sugar that are rationed so far, but they reckon there’ll soon be plenty more.’

‘Yeah, I think every damned thing will be rationed in the end,’ Polly said. ‘They’re just breaking us in gently. Shall we go down this afternoon and get ourselves sorted?’

‘If you like, but I’ve got to do something first.’

‘What?’

‘I’ve got to pawn Bill’s watch,’ Marion said. ‘I hung on to that till the last minute, but I’ve fallen behind with the rent and need more coal.’

‘Do you want me to come?’

Marion shook her head. ‘I must do this on my own,’ she said. ‘I can’t keep relying on you holding my hand all the time.’

‘Well, don’t let yourself get fleeced,’ Polly cautioned. ‘Don’t accept the first offer.’

Marion, though, was too saddened at having to pawn all the things she had treasured so much to argue overly about the value of the watch. She knew the money raised would buy food and coal and pay off her rent, but she was very much aware that she had pawned the last item of value that she possessed apart from her wedding ring. She knew that would be the next thing to disappear and she was filled with depression at the thought of losing that golden band that she had never taken from her finger since Bill had put it there in 1922.

Just a day or so after this, Tony and Jack were once more serving at early morning Mass. Tony felt very miserable because the previous evening meal hadn’t really filled him up and he had gone to bed with his stomach grumbling. And then he had to get up early in the coal black of a winter’s day and go out into the frost-rimed streets with nothing to eat or drink at all because he would be taking Communion. By the time he got to the church, despite his good thick coat, he was cold all through and feeling very sorry for himself.

Jack was already in the vestry when he got there and he took one look at Tony’s glum face and said, ‘What’s up with you?’

‘Nothing,’ Tony growled out. ‘I’m all right.’

‘God, are you really?’ Jack said ironically. His dark eyes sparkled with humour. ‘Hate to see you when you’re not all right, that’s all I can say. You have a face on you that would turn the milk sour.’

‘Oh, shurrup, can’t you?’ Tony cried.

‘Now, boys,’ the priest said, coming in at that moment, ‘what’s all this? I hope you’re not arguing in God’s house.’

‘No, Father,’ the boys said in unison, and the priest, not believing them for an instant, said, ‘Good. Now I have to go out for a while. One of my parishioners is very ill and asking for me and I want you to wait here until my return.’

‘What about school, Father?’

‘You’ll be away in plenty of time to go to school, Jack, never fear.’

But shall we be in time to eat some breakfast, such as it is, before school? Tony thought, but didn’t say anything. Father McIntyre had been a bit sharp with both of them since the business with the holy water font. So the boys waited as the minutes ticked by.

Eventually Jack said, ‘I reckon he’s not coming back. Shall we just go home?’

‘We can’t do that,’ Tony answered. ‘If he comes back and we’re not here, I will get in one heap of trouble.’

‘We’ll get the strap if we’re late for school.’

‘And if I don’t have something to eat soon I’ll fall into a dead heap on the floor,’ Tony said. ‘I’m starving.’

‘I could eat something too,’ Jack said as he began to prowl around the room.

He opened a long cupboard and saw the priest’s vestments hanging there. They were very beautiful, in vibrant colours or stark white, according to the Church calendar, in satin or shiny silk and heavily embossed and decorated with intricate embroidery in gold or silver.

‘My dad said these cost a packet to make,’ Jack said, flicking his finger through them. ‘He said before the war, when people were starving ‘cos there weren’t no jobs or owt, it seemed all wrong to him to see the priests dressed up in these when they came to Mass on Sunday morning. Price of them, he reckoned, would feed ten families for a year.’

Tony didn’t doubt it. ‘Don’t you think you’d better shut the door now, Jack? If Father McIntyre comes back—‘

‘Aren’t you one scaredy-cat, Tony Whittaker?’ Jack said jeeringly. He shut the door, though, but opened the door on the other side. There was the bottle of Communion wine. The bottle had been opened ready to mix with water in the chalice at the Mass. ‘D’you suppose it’s real wine?’ he said, withdrawing it from the cupboard.

‘I don’t know, but put the flipping thing back, Jack, before the pair of us are killed.’

‘Like I said, you’re a scaredy-cat.’

That jibe, issued for the second time in so many minutes, cut Tony to the quick. ‘I ain’t,’ he said, ‘but I just get punished much more than you if we do owt.’

‘Prove you ain’t scared then.’

‘How?’

‘Let’s try some.’

‘You’re barmy.’

‘And you’re scared,’ Jack said. ‘I dare you. I’ll do it first, if you like. He won’t miss a few sips of wine, will he? He has a whole bottle.’

Tony thought that he would show Jack what he was made of and he grabbed the bottle from Jack, put it to his mouth, took a couple of hefty swigs and began spluttering and gasping.

‘Don’t think you’re supposed to neck it like that,’ Jack said. ‘And you have taken an awful lot. He’s sure to notice.’

‘Now who’s scared,’ Tony said, wiping his eyes with his sleeve.

‘I ain’t scared,’ Jack declared, taking a hefty swig himself.

‘God, Jack, there ain’t that much left. What we going to do?’

‘S all right, we’ll fill it up with water,’ Jack said. ‘He mixes it with water, anyroad, so he won’t even notice.’

‘Come on then.’

‘Not yet. We can have a bit more if we’re going to fill the bottle up anyway. Let’s have some more. It’s good stuff, this, ain’t it?’

Tony had actually never tasted anything so foul, but no way was he going to admit that, and he nodded his head vigorously and put his hand out for the bottle.

When Father McIntyre returned a little later he found two highly intoxicated altar boys in his vestry, and the bottle of Communion wine only a quarter full.

That evening, Marion wrote to Bill.

I told you about the incident with the water pistols, and Pat’s reaction to it. Well, early this morning the boys did something far worse. While they were supposed to be serving at Mass, the priest was called out of the sacristy to deal with something and what did those two rips do but help themselves to the Communion wine. They drank so much that they were unable to serve at the Mass, or do anything else either. The pair were once again marched to our Polly’s. Pat hadn’t left for work and Father McIntyre told him that if he didn’t thrash his son and Tony too, as you are away, then he would do the job himself. So he had to thrash them, for once. Honest to God, Bill, if we’re not careful that son of ours will end up in Winson Green Prison. When you come home I want you to have a stern word with him.

Bill knew the boys had to be punished, but he was very glad that Pat had done the thrashing and not the priest. Father McIntyre would have seen it as his bounden duty to scourge the wickedness out of them. And yet he felt sorry that Marion had to deal with all this on her own. She did have her hands full and he could do little to ease it, but he did write a censorious letter to Tony, telling him that he was letting the family down and he had to behave himself. He only hoped that it might make a difference.

It did make a difference. Bill had never written to Tony in that way before, and Tony valued his good opinion, so he was determined to try to be good.

Marion was glad that he was behaving because she had so much more to worry about. She was forced to part with her wedding ring and Mary Ellen brought her one in Woolworths to replace it.

Now Marion was really worried because she had nothing else left to pawn. Soon she would need coal again and she didn’t know how she was going to scrape the money together.

When she mentioned this to Polly she said, ‘You must get your Tony doing what Chris and Colm had to do many a time.’

‘What was that?’ Marion asked.

‘He’ll have to go down the Saltley Gas Works real early in the morning …’ Polly said.

‘The carts the horses are pulling are laden down with coal,’ Marion told Tony later. ‘And when they come out the gate and speed up over the cobbles some of it falls off. You must go down with a bucket to collect it up and you must be there before seven in the morning.’

‘Ah, Mom!’ Tony cried. ‘That’s miles away.’

‘Not at all,’ Marion said briskly, though she felt for her younger son. ‘If you go down Rocky Lane and along the canal it will take you no time at all.’ Then seeing his disbelieving expression she said sharply, ‘And you can take that look off your face because that is what you must do and that’s all there is to it.’

When Tony related this to Jack at school that morning he knew all about it. ‘My brothers did that,’ he said, ‘but I never had to. Our Chris used to say that some kids took two buckets, one for the coal and one to collect the horse shit to use on their garden or allotment.’

‘Ugh! That’s disgusting!’

‘Well, you ain’t got to do that, anyway,’ Jack said. ‘D’you want me to come with you?’

‘Would you?’ Tony would be glad of his cousin’s company in those inky black and dismal mornings.

‘Course,’ Jack said airily. ‘Anyroad, two’s better than one.’

‘Won’t your mom mind?’ Tony asked.

‘Course not,’ Jack said confidently. ‘Why would she mind?’

Tony could think of a hundred and one objections his mother might have made to such a plan, but Jack’s parents were a different kettle of fish altogether. Tony didn’t tell his mother of Jack’s involvement, though.

From the first day Tony was glad that Jack was beside him. Jack was much bigger than Tony, for a start, and not so easily pushed around. That was important because there were loads of other boys at the same thing. By the time they set off home Jack always had more in his bucket than Tony did. Not far from the Whittaker house, Jack would tip the contents of his bucket into Tony’s and he would take it home and tip it into the coal shed. Even with the two of them scavenging, he only had a meagre amount of coal, but he knew that every penny counted to his mother, and buying coal was an expensive business.

One morning, when Tony had been collecting the coal for a fortnight, he was full of misery when he met Jack.

Catching sight of his glowering face in the beam of the shielded torch he had thought to bring, Jack said, ‘What’s up with you? You have a face on you like a smacked bum.’

‘There ain’t nothing wrong,’ Tony muttered.

‘Don’t give me that.’

‘Well, what’s the use of telling you owt anyway?’ Tony said. ‘It ain’t as if you can do owt about it.’

‘Well, I can’t if you don’t tell me.’

‘All right then,’ Tony burst out. ‘Every day we stand here to collect a piddling bit of coal that does no good at all. When I come home from school, the house is always sort of cold and damp, and there’s usually just a glow in the range, nearly buried under a heap of slack.’

‘Well,’ said Jack, ‘we know where the coal’s kept, so why don’t we wait until it’s dark, crawl under the fence and get ourselves a couple of bucketfuls?’

Tony was doubtful. ‘Ain’t that stealing?’

Jack considered the matter. ‘It ain’t any more stealing than picking up the lumps that fall off the carts when they clatter up the road. They fill them up too full on purpose so that some will fall off and we get to pick them up. This way we are sort of saving them the bother.’

The way Jack explained, it sounded fine to Tony. After all, there was so much coal in the gas works mound; he had seen it through the gate. Surely they wouldn’t miss a little bit. Then Jack said, ‘Let’s see what we can get this morning anyway, and then tonight when everyone has gone to sleep we’ll go for plan B. What time in your house does everyone go to bed, ‘cos it would be best to keep this to ourselves?’

‘About ten or so,’ Tony said. ‘I’m not really that sure because I’m usually asleep myself by then.’

‘Better make it eleven, then, to be on the safe side,’ Jack suggested. ‘Meet me at the end of your road at eleven.’

‘Yeah, all right.’ Tony was hardly able to believe that he had agreed to sneak out of his home that night when everyone was asleep. It wasn’t something that he had ever considered doing in the whole of his life. He was scared stiff, but he couldn’t bear to see the disdain in Jack’s eyes if he said he couldn’t do such a thing, so he knew he would be there with his bucket at eleven o’clock.

Two or three times that night Tony nearly nodded off. The early mornings were beginning to tell on him and he had to get out of bed and walk around the room. When Richard came to bed, however, he couldn’t do that, and he curled in a ball and pretended to be asleep. He dared not shut his eyes, however, but kept them wide open and forced himself to lie still until Richard’s even breathing told Tony he was asleep.

Still he lay there until he heard his mother’s tread on the stairs. He was glad he did because she opened the door but, seeing everything was quiet, didn’t go into the room. Tony counted to five hundred slowly, and then slid stealthily out of bed. He knew that he would be dressing in the dark and so he had left his clothes out on the chair by his side of the bed in a particular way and was dressing himself as quietly as possible when Richard turned over and said, ‘Where you going?’

‘Ssh,’ Tony said frantically. ‘You’ll have Mom awake.’

‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ Richard said. ‘I’ll wake her all right if you don’t tell what you’re up to.’

Tony bit his lip. Jack said to tell no one. That was all right to say in his house, where no one seemed to give a tuppenny damn what anyone else was doing, but in his house it was a different matter and he knew if he refused to tell Richard he would fetch their mother, and the plan he and Jack had cooked up would be scuppered before it had even been tried.

So Tony said, ‘I’m going to get some coal from the gas yard.’

‘Tony, that’s stealing.’

‘No it ain’t,’ Tony cried. ‘No more than standing there every bloody morning and fighting with every other bugger for any tiny bits that fall off the carts.’

‘Shurrup,’ Richard said. ‘You told me quick enough. It’s you that will have our mom awake, and she’ll be armed with a cake of soap to wash out your mouth.’

‘It’s all right for you.’ Tony went on, lowering his voice to a hissing whisper and ignoring the reference to the soap. ‘You don’t know what it’s like, and even though Jack comes with me all we get is a piddling bit in the bottom of the perishing bucket.’

It was news to Richard that Jack had been going to the gas works gates every morning with his young brother, and now he had told him what he intended to do Richard didn’t know what action to take. He knew really that he ought to go across the landing and tell his mother. What would they all do if he did that? Freeze to bloody death, that’s what, and so he said to Tony, ‘Are you doing this on your own?’

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.