Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This edition published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2015

Copyright © Anne Bennett 1999

First published in 1999 by HEADLINE BOOK PUBLISHING

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

Cover photographs © Gordon Crabb (woman); Colin Thomas (girl); Mirrorpix (mirrorpix)

Anne Bennett asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007547784

Ebook Edition © May 2015 ISBN: 9780007547791

Version: 2017-10-18

To my lovely husband, Denis, with all my love.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter ONE

Chapter TWO

Chapter THREE

Chapter FOUR

Chapter FIVE

Chapter SIX

Chapter SEVEN

Chapter EIGHT

Chapter NINE

Chapter TEN

Chapter ELEVEN

Chapter TWELVE

Chapter THIRTEEN

Chapter FOURTEEN

Chapter FIFTEEN

Chapter SIXTEEN

Chapter SEVENTEEN

Chapter EIGHTEEN

Chapter NINETEEN

Chapter TWENTY

Chapter TWENTY-ONE

Chapter TWENTY-TWO

Chapter TWENTY-THREE

Chapter TWENTY-FOUR

Chapter TWENTY-FIVE

Chapter TWENTY-SIX

Chapter TWENTY-SEVEN

Chapter TWENTY-EIGHT

Acknowledgements

Keep Reading Back List

Keep Reading: Another Man’s Child

About the Author

Also by Anne Bennett

About the Publisher

ONE

Mary Sullivan heard the dragging feet in the entry and swung the door wide to see her eldest daughter Kathy just about to push it open. The dejected sag of Kathy’s shoulders told its own tale as Mary drew her inside. ‘Wait, pet,’ she said. ‘I’ll brew us both a drop of tea.’

‘No, Mammy, I can’t stay,’ Kathy said. ‘I’ve left Barry minding the weans.’ She shook her head angrily. ‘Oh God, it’s no job for a man.’ She looked at her mother, her deep brown eyes sombre, and said, ‘D’you know, he was over at Northfield today, after a job on the building he’d heard about. Course, it was gone by the time he got there and then he walked back to save the tram fare. But the thing is, his boots are falling off his feet and I don’t know whether it wouldn’t have been better to pay the fare and save his boot leather.’

‘Ah, girl, I’m heart-sore for you,’ Mary said.

‘I couldn’t stand the look on his face, Mammy,’ Kathy cried. ‘I took the few coppers he’d saved and went down the Bull Ring. I got some bones and vegetables cheap, you know how they sell them off at this time of night. At least I’ll make a nourishing meal with it tomorrow.’

Mary looked at her daughter sadly. ‘Wait,’ she said, and went out of the room, coming back a minute later with a loaf wrapped in a cloth.

‘Ah no, Mammy, you do enough,’ Kathy protested.

‘We have plenty,’ Mary said. ‘Sure everyone in the house is working now but Carmel, and she’s turned twelve, she’ll be left school in a couple of years. Take it.’

‘I will,’ Kathy said. ‘For the weans, at least. Barry said they must have the best food first. He’s terrified something will happen to them that they won’t be well nourished enough to fight. I can understand it; after all, his two young brothers were taken with TB and his da was out of work at the time. Barry said there was little money for food and none at all for doctors, or medicines, and the youngsters were too weak to fight it on their own.’

‘He’s a good man you have, Kathy, and a good father,’ Mary said. ‘Things could be worse. Maybe in the new year Barry’s luck will change. God’s good.’

Kathy sighed. She had no hopes for the new year, for Barry had been out of work for four long years and she dreaded Christmas, with nothing for the weans at all. She was beset by worries. Her daughter Lizzie needed new boots – the ones she had pinched her feet and Kathy’d had to line them with cardboard to keep her feet dry – and Danny only had one jumper that fitted him now, and that was ragged and all over holes. She couldn’t lay all this at her mother’s door and so she kissed her goodbye.

There was another worry pressing on Kathy’s head, but it was nothing she could share with her mother either, or anyone else for that matter. Barry never made love to her any more. They slept side by side in the same bed and could well have been strangers. Often Kathy would long for Barry’s arms around her, or his lips on hers – not of course that she could say that to him, but still she missed the closeness they used to share. She knew he wanted no more children till he got a job, but still…

She was not to know that Barry realised how quickly kisses and cuddles could lead to other things, and he couldn’t risk it. If it wasn’t for his in-laws helping, the two children he had would go to bed, time and enough, with empty bellies. It tore his heart out that he was not able to provide for his own weans. God forbid he would bring another into the world to the same fate.

Lizzie and Danny were the only ones Barry could be natural with. He’d never been an inactive man before unemployment, and had never given much of a thought to the children either. Their rearing would be down to Kathy, like his had been down to his mother. But he’d been laid off before Danny’s birth, and now the boy was three going on four, and Lizzie six and a half.

At first, like many others, Barry had gone to meetings, listened to rallying calls and taken part in marches and demonstrations, but all to no avail. He knew he had to get out from under Kathy’s feet during the day, but hanging around street corners was not for him and there was no money for the pub, so he began to go for long walks.

He tended to veer away from the town, a thankless place to visit when he had money for nothing in the city centre shops. At first, his feet took him towards Calthorpe Park, or often as far as Cannon Hill, where he’d walk hour upon hour and return home tired and more dispirited than ever. However, one day, tired of the same route and with his stomach yawning in emptiness, he turned down Bristol Passage into Bristol Street and from there on into Suffolk Street, coming out at the top end of town by the Town Hall, and there he saw the lending library.

Barry had never been inside the library; there had been no occasion to. Although he could read, since he’d left school there had been little leisure to do so. Except for now, he thought, and he went in, glad of the blast of warm air, for the day outside was raw and his clothes were pitifully threadbare and thin.

It was very quiet also, quiet like Barry had never met before. He’d grown up in a small back-to-back house, first among a clutch of brothers and then with a family of his own, where noise was part of life and everyone knew everyone else’s business. The silence of the library was like a balm to Barry’s bruised soul, and the only sound was that of his boots on the wooden floor.

And then he saw the papers, such an array of them laid out, presumably for anyone to read. He sat down, and as he read first one and then another, his hunger was forgotten and the time sped by, although the papers made frightening reading. After a few days of intense study of the political situation in Germany, he was more aware than most of the mad little Austrian ruling the country. He knew that if only half the tales coming out of that beleaguered place were true, the man was a dangerous and vicious maniac, and he wondered how long the rest of Europe was going to stand by and watch. He said none of this at home for, God alone knew, Kathy had enough on her plate and it would serve no purpose frightening any of the family, possibly needlessly.

He progressed from the papers to books to fill the long winter evenings, and was choosing some one day when his eyes alighted on the children’s section of the library. He could buy little for his children, on twenty-six shillings a week for himself and Kathy, and two shillings extra each for Lizzie and Danny, but the lending library was free, and so he began to bring books home for them and read to them regularly.

Lizzie loved her daddy. He had more patience than her mother and was gentler somehow. He’d taught her to love books and write her name before she went to school. She liked nothing better than to snuggle down in the chair with him, her on one side and Danny on the other, and listen while her daddy read to them.

And that was how Kathy found them when she went in that day, and for some reason it irritated her seeing them all cuddled up cosily together. ‘Get up out of that,’ she said angrily. ‘Sitting there and the pair of you like a couple of tinkers! Get down to the cellar this minute, you need a wash before bed.’

‘Oh, Mammy!’

‘Do as your mother bids you,’ Barry said, scattering the two from his knee.

Lizzie glared at her mother. Mammy always spoils things, she thought, she’s always shouting. But wanting to live to see her seventh birthday, the little girl said not a word, but walked across the room and took her brother’s hand at the top of the cellar steps.

Barry stopped Kathy as she was about to follow the children. ‘Solly came by,’ he said. ‘One of the men has been taken ill at the market, he says he’ll put a word in for me.’

‘Regular?’

‘Well, till the man’s better. Even a couple of days is better than nothing.’

‘Is it?’ Kathy snapped. ‘And what if the means test people get to hear of it? What then?’

Barry was silent. He knew Kathy had a point, but he’d been pleased, almost excited, and had expected her to feel the same. After all, any job was better than no bloody thing at all. ‘I thought,’ he said at last, ‘I thought I could buy the weans things for Christmas, a wee orange each or maybe even a skipping rope for Lizzie, I know she’d like one.’

‘You know she’d like one!’ Kathy repeated, and her eyes flashed with temper. ‘What’s this “like”, all of a sudden? The things I’d like, I have to go without. The child needs new boots on her feet and you talk about a skipping rope.’

‘They’re only weans, Kathy.’

‘I know that,’ Kathy snapped. Suddenly it was too much for her and tears of frustration ran down her cheeks. She needed her husband’s arms around her to comfort and reassure. He was quick enough to put them round the children, but now he held them by his side, terrified that the dam keeping his own feelings in check would burst if he attempted to hold his wife close, as he longed to.

‘I do my bloody best,’ he said grimly.

‘Well, it’s not good enough,’ Kathy burst out in hurt anger. ‘You make me sick. Get out of my way, I must see to the weans.’

Barry stared at his wife in silence for a minute, and then snapped, ‘Oh, I’ll get out of your way all right. I’m away to me ma’s, where the welcome is always warm and the company’s better.’

‘Go to hell for all I care,’ Kathy snapped back, though her heart sank.

Below, in the damp, chilly cellar, Lizzie and Danny waited and listened. Lizzie knew it was all her mammy’s fault. Her daddy couldn’t help being out of work, lots of daddies were, and she shouldn’t have shouted at him like she did. When she heard the slam of the door and watched her father’s feet walk over the cellar grating, she began to shiver, and it wasn’t just from the cold of the place.

Kathy, descending the steps, was ashamed of herself. She shouldn’t have gone for him like that. God forgive her for what she’d yelled at him that evening. What had he been doing that was so wrong when she’d come in? Just amusing the weans with a story while he minded them. Was she jealous of her own children? No, she told herself, that was silly, but she knew that if she wasn’t careful, by the time Barry did get a job, they’d only have the shreds of marriage to hold on to, and when she went into the cellar, the children’s accusing faces filled her with guilt.

From then on, Barry and Kathy’s relationship deteriorated steadily, though they never spoke of the argument again. Barry had been bitterly hurt by Kathy’s accusation that he hadn’t tried hard enough to find work, and he couldn’t forgive her for it.

He did get a fortnight’s work in the market, and in a gesture of defiance bought a skipping rope for Lizzie and a toy car and marbles for Danny. He put them in the stockings they hung up on Christmas Eve, together with a shiny penny, a small orange and a bar of candy each. It was a grand Christmas morning for them, though Barry hardly spoke to Kathy and his only smiles were for his children.

Kathy longed to say she was sorry, but the words choked in her throat. Later, when they went to her mother’s and Mary produced the children’s presents – a pair of new shoes for Lizzie and a jumper she’d knitted for Danny – Kathy was consumed with shame that she and Barry weren’t able to buy those things for the children themselves, even though she was very grateful. Mary waved away her protests. ‘Let us do it while we can, child. God alone knows how long young Michael will be in work, with him turning sixteen in the new year.’

Kathy knew fine what her mother meant. Her youngest brother Michael had been an errand boy at Wrenson’s, the grocer’s shop, since he’d left school two years earlier. Once the lads reached sixteen, they were normally replaced by a school leaver, who at fourteen would work for less money. It was no good moaning about it; that was the system. Everyone was keeping an eye out for Michael, but the family knew that he would probably be drawing the dole with Barry before long.

So Kathy said nothing more and put Lizzie’s old boots away for Danny – maybe she could afford to have them soled sometime. Anyway, for a wee while longer the children were all right, and she blessed the fact that she had her close family all around her to help out all they could.

Mary knew things weren’t right between Kathy and Barry, but she said nothing, not even to her husband Eamonn. Though both seemed fine with the children, there was a definite frostiness between them. Few would have seen it – there was much jollification when the family all got together, and bad feelings could often be successfully covered up – and she hoped it was just a temporary thing.

New Year’s Eve was celebrated as always at the Sullivans’, where all the clan and many neighbours crammed into the little house and the children took refuge under the table with eatables they’d pilfered. Pat, the eldest of the Sullivans’ sons, was the ‘First Foot’ after midnight and arrived at the door to a chorus of ‘Happy New Year!’ carrying some silver coins, a lump of coal and a bottle of whisky that Eamonn had hidden away. They all drank a toast and hoped that 1938 would be a better year. Mary was glad to see Barry with a wide smile on his face for once. Of course that could be put down to the amount he’d drunk, not that it had been excessive but Mary had the idea that he and Kathy lived on bread and scrape and not much of that. On that sort of diet it didn’t take more than a drop or two to knock a man off his feet. She worried they’d both become ill if they didn’t eat more, and Barry needed to keep his strength up so that if he got a job, he’d be able for it.

She did what she could by feeding the children as often as Kathy let them come, and often sent round a pie or bit of stew and the odd loaf, but she had the feeling that it fed the children only. They were certainly sturdy enough and had the well-nourished look missing from many of the ragged, bare-footed children one saw around. God, it was desperate, so it was, how some of them lived.

Lizzie was a carbon copy of her mother, with jet-black hair and dark-brown eyes with long black lashes, but she still had the bloom Kathy had lost. Her face was the open one of a child, not the old face of many of the urchins, and her cheeks had the pink tinge Kathy’s had once boasted. She also had her mother’s wide mouth, but no worry lines were there to pull it down.

Danny had his father’s sandy hair, and a bit of the chubbiness of babyhood still clung to him. He was very like his father, with his round face, and he had the same-shaped nose and mouth as Barry, but his deep-brown eyes were like those of his mother and sister, for his father’s eyes were grey. Indeed, Mary thought they were fine children, and enough to look after when a man had no job. Thank God Kathy had had no more after Danny.

Kathy pleaded tiredness just after twelve, and Eamonn helped her carry the sleepy children home and put them to bed, but Barry stayed on longer, pouring out his troubles to his good friend, Pat. He and Pat had been through school together since the age of five, and it was through him that Barry had begun courting Kathy. Pat’s own wife Bridie was known as a nag, but he was so easy-going, it seldom bothered him. ‘Water off a duck’s back,’ he was fond of saying, but he sensed that whatever was wrong between Barry and Kathy went deeper and couldn’t be laughed off.

‘I don’t know what she wants me to do,’ Barry complained. ‘God knows I’ve looked for work hard enough. If I stay in she nags, if I go out she complains. If I play with the weans I’m spoiling them and I could be doing something useful.’ Barry shook his head from side to side in puzzlement at it all.

‘God, Barry, don’t be trying to understand women,’ Pat said. ‘What goes on in their minds is beyond me altogether, we just have to put up with it.’

Barry wondered if he could. There had been times before Christmas when he’d wanted to walk out and leave them all to it.

‘Come on,’ Pat said. ‘It’s a new year, a new start, nineteen thirty-eight will be your year, you’ll see.’

Barry chinked his glass against his brother-in-law’s. ‘New year, new job,’ Pat said, and Barry was infected by his optimism.

‘Aye,’ he agreed.

It was much later when he made his unsteady way home. Once inside his own house he began to see the stupidity of thinking that way. New Year’s Eve was just a day like any other, and he was just as unlikely to get a job in 1938 as he had been in ’37, ’36, ’35 or ’34. God, the dole was a living death that ate away at you inside, and now he’d got Kathy pouring scorn on him for not trying hard enough.

Upstairs, Kathy was either asleep or pretending to be. Either way, it suited Barry, and he slid in quietly beside her. God, what a life, he thought. I have a wife who lies beside me like a stranger and who hardly talks to me, and he remembered with a twinge of nostalgia the heady days early in their marriage when they couldn’t get enough of each other. Now, Barry thought, Kathy had settled without complaint into a sexless relationship. Maybe sex hadn’t been important to her. Maybe she’d just pretended that it had. He’d known from his limited sexual experience that most women didn’t enjoy it, and he thought that in Kathy he’d found a gem. Just went to show it was all put on, a pretence, or surely she would have said something by now. Ah, but what the odds, what could he have done even if she’d said anything? Once he’d loved her so much, but it seemed a lifetime ago now. With a grunt that was almost a groan, he turned on his side away from Kathy and settled to sleep.

*

One raw February day, the O’Malley household was roused by a furious knocking on the door. The clock showed barely six o’clock, and Barry struggled into his trousers and ran down the stairs to find young Michael on the doorstep. Michael had been on the dole for just over a month, as everyone had expected. Now he was breathless, both because he’d run from his house and also because of excitement.

Barry pulled him inside, for the wind was fierce. He knew something must have happened for Michael to be there so early in the morning, and in such a state of agitation. ‘What is it?’

‘They’re…they’re setting on at BSA,’ Michael panted, hardly able to get the words out.

Barry hadn’t been aware he was holding his breath till he suddenly let it out in a loud sigh. He’d been expecting bad news of some sort, but this…He remembered how once he’d been like Michael, shooting off in all directions, chasing one job offer and the hundreds after it. He couldn’t feel excitement like that again, but he couldn’t dim the light in Michael’s eyes. ‘Where did you hear it?’ he asked.

‘Paddy Molloy came in this morning and was after telling Da. He was set on yesterday. His cousin told him about it.’

‘BSA the cycle place?’

‘Aye.’

‘And this was yesterday?’

‘Aye, last night.’

‘Any vacancies will be long gone by now, Michael.’

‘No, it’s new lines, I’m telling you,’ Michael burst out. ‘Molloy said there’ll be jobs for us all, and the new lines aren’t making bicycles.’

‘Well what, then?’

‘Guns.’

‘Guns?’ Kathy exclaimed. Neither Barry nor Michael had seen her come into the room. Now she stood before her brother, Danny in her arms, and repeated, ‘Guns! Did you say they’re making guns?’

‘Aye, Molloy told us. A lot of the old workers have been made up to inspectors, he said.’

‘But what do they want so many guns for?’ Kathy asked.

‘How should I know?’

Barry thought he knew only too well, but he didn’t share his thoughts. Instead he said, ‘Well, I’m away to get dressed. It’s worth going for if all Molloy says is true.’

Kathy looked after him. She couldn’t even feel pleased, and certainly not optimistic. God alone knew she’d been pleased enough in the beginning, when she’d thought Barry would be set on any day and he’d been flying all around the place on one unlikely jaunt after another, until hope had dimmed and dejection set in. ‘Have you time for a drop of tea?’ she asked her brother.

‘No, we’ll have to go as soon as Barry’s ready. We’ll need to be early to have a chance.’ He’d just finished speaking when Barry entered the room, pulling a jumper over his head and grabbing his coat off the hook on the door. Lizzie was trailing behind him.

‘Have you any money?’ Barry asked Kathy. ‘We’ll have to take the tram there at least.’

Kathy tipped out her purse. ‘Two and threepence,’ she said. ‘All the money I have in the world,’ and she extracted a shilling and gave it to him. ‘Good luck,’ she said.

‘Thanks.’ Barry made no move towards her, but she hadn’t expected a kiss; that had stopped some time before. Instead he lifted Danny from her arms and kissed him soundly before setting him on his feet, and then bent down to Lizzie and, kissing her cheek, said, ‘Pray for me, pet, this could be it.’

Kathy felt tears prick behind her eyes as she watched Barry and Michael stride down the road. She might have been a dummy for all the notice her husband took of her. She gave the children their breakfast, supervised their wash and helped Danny get dressed, but her mind was far away. She had no hope left that there’d be a job for Barry, and she feared he’d come back more morose and depressed than ever.

‘It’s all right, Mammy,’ Lizzie assured her, catching sight of Kathy’s worried face as they walked to school. ‘I’ve prayed to the Virgin Mary.’

Oh, to have a child’s faith, Kathy thought, but she smiled at her daughter and gave her hand a squeeze. She couldn’t help wondering, though, what BSA wanted with so many guns, and why they should take on Michael and Barry when neither of them knew a damn thing about making them.

But when Barry came back, one look at his face told Kathy he’d been successful, and when he caught her around the waist and hugged her, she suppressed the thought that if Lizzie hadn’t been at school and Danny at her mother’s she wouldn’t have got a look-in. ‘I start tomorrow at six,’ Barry said. ‘Michael’s working along with me and we have as much overtime as we can take.’

‘That’s great, so it is! Great!’ Kathy said, and she felt the worry of the last years slip from her.

‘Is that trying hard enough for you?’ Barry asked, his face stern.

‘Oh, can’t we forget that stupid quarrel?’ Kathy said. ‘I was sorry as soon as I said it. God, how many times I wished it unsaid.’

‘You never told me.’

‘I’m telling you now, and I am sorry, Barry, truly I am,’ Kathy said, facing her husband.

Suddenly Barry was seized by desire for his young wife. ‘You could show me how sorry you really are,’ he said, and his face was very close to Kathy’s, his voice slightly husky. She could read the expression in his eyes and knew what he wanted. ‘We have the place to ourselves and it’s been a bloody long time.’

Too right, Kathy thought, and though she had plenty to do, she turned the key in the lock of the door to the street and the one into the entry, and followed her husband up the stairs.

Lizzie really missed her father when he went to work, though she sensed everyone else was pleased. Her mother didn’t snap so much at her and Danny now, and she was friends with her daddy again. Lizzie often saw them laughing together, and Daddy sometimes kissed Mammy when he thought no one could see.

So they were all happier, and Grandma said that, ‘Things are back to normal again, thank God,’ and only Lizzie was the slightest bit miserable. Her father worked long hours and any overtime going, and he got home too late and too tired to play with Lizzie and Danny as he used to. Often he was so late they were in bed when he got in and he had only time to give them a kiss. Danny had often fallen asleep, but Lizzie would wait, however tired she was, for her father’s tread on the stairs.

It was June now and almost Lizzie’s seventh birthday. Just after it, she would make her first holy communion. She knew most of her catechism and things were going along nicely at school, but no one at home seemed bothered. Who would make her dress, Lizzie wondered, or could she choose one, in the market? She imagined a veil with flowers on the band at the front like she’d seen others wearing. She longed for white sandals, which would be the prettiest shoes she’d ever had in her life, and white socks, so different from the grey woollen ones of winter and the bare legs of summer.

Eventually she broached the subject with her mother. ‘You’re neither having a dress made nor am I buying one; you’re having Sheelagh’s.’

‘Sheelagh’s?’ She was having to wear a cast-off from her hated cousin Sheelagh! Why hadn’t she thought that could happen? Her cousin was a year older than her and so had had her first communion the previous year. ‘And are the veil and the sandals and socks from Sheelagh too?’

‘Yes, and you can take that look off your face, miss, before I take it off for you,’ her mother said angrily. ‘I know your father’s working now, but there’s a lot of things we need and it’s silly to spend money on things Sheelagh already has.’

Lizzie knew she was right, but it made it no easier to bear. Nor did the party that her mammy arranged for Lizzie’s seventh birthday make it much easier either. She’d never had a party before, and the jelly and blancmange and tinned fruit had been delicious and she should have been thrilled. But across the table sat her hated cousin with a silly smile on her face that made Lizzie want to smack her. Sheelagh was a spiteful cat, and Lizzie knew what she was thinking, and she knew that she’d tell them all at school that Lizzie O’Malley was wearing her old communion dress.

But before long, Lizzie had more to worry about, and that was confession! Miss Conroy had let all the new communicants look in the confessional box, and of course they’d rehearsed and rehearsed all they would say, but that was nothing like the real thing.

The night before, she lay in bed thinking about it, and the more she thought, the more despairing she became. It was her first confession, and for that reason she’d had to examine her conscience not just for the last week or fortnight, but for the whole of her seven years. Lizzie decided there were a devil of a lot of sins you could build up in seven years, and she thought of all the bad things she’d done.

Disobedience – she wasn’t very good at doing as she was told. Not that she openly disobeyed her mother, or even her grandma – she might be bold, but she wasn’t stupid, and she had no wish to shorten her life. Forgetting prayers – oh, how easy it was to slip between the sheets at night if her mother and father didn’t come up straight away and make her kneel beside the bed. Then, when they did come up, Lizzie, not wishing to leave her warm bed, would often say she’d already said her prayers, so that was adding lies to it. And in the morning she was up and away and had started the day before she gave a mind to them, and then something more interesting would claim her attention if and when she did ever remember. Then there was fighting – she wondered if that was a sin; if it was, her soul must be as black as pitch, she decided, for she’d fought with Sheelagh for as long as she could remember.

And who would be hearing confession? It mattered because Father Flaherty was likely to give you a whole decade of the rosary for forgetting your prayers once, while Father Cunningham was much kinder and more understanding. But did you know who it was when they had the screen between them and you, and then voices were probably muffled in the box?

Lizzie decided she’d better not say she’d been too bad, for if it was Father Flaherty on the other side, she might spend the rest of her life on her knees. She’d say she’d been disobedient and cheeky and sometimes forgot her prayers; it would be better not to say she couldn’t be bothered sometimes. Anyway, three sins would do for now, Lizzie thought, as she curled sleepily in the bed. She had a mind it would take quite a few confessions to account for seven years of sins.

In the event it wasn’t so bad at all. They sat in the pews in the dimly lit church that was almost as familiar to them as their classroom, and shuffled down the rows, one by one, towards the confessional box in their turn. Strain as the children might, they could hear not a word spoken, just a tantalising mumble, and Lizzie was glad no one could hear the bold things she would tell to the priest.

Lizzie’s friend Maura Mahon told her that priests went blind into the confessional – it was well known, she said – and when you’d confessed, as soon as you left the box, anything you told them was wiped from their memory. Lizzie thought that very comforting, even if it was only Father Cunningham hearing the first confessions of the children.

Lizzie was given three Hail Marys and a Glory Be as a penance for the list of sins she told to the priest and Maura had the same, but Mairead Cleary had to say a whole decade of the rosary! Ask as they might, none of the children could get her to tell them what she’d said to be given such a heavy penance. Maura whispered to Lizzie she thought you’d get little more if you murdered someone and Lizzie was inclined to agree.

Certainly Mairead looked sorry enough as she knelt at the rails of the side altar with the statue of the Virgin Mary before her. She had her head bowed for a long time, but then one Our Father, ten Hail Marys and a Glory Be can’t be said in a couple of minutes. When Lizzie saw Mairead make the sign of the cross and then drop a coin in the box and light a candle, her eyes nearly popped out of her head; she’d never had money for candles.

‘She’s just making sure,’ Maura whispered. ‘She’s lit a candle so that Our Lady will put in a good word for her with God.’

‘She must have done something desperate, all right,’ Lizzie said with awe.

Her mammy had always said the Clearys were a funny bunch. She said it was strange these days to have the money they seemed to have to splash about when never a one of them appeared to be in work to earn it.

But all the same – a whole decade of the rosary…

The Saturday night before Lizzie’s first communion was the same as every other Saturday night as far back as she could remember. Her mammy would fill the boiler in the cellar early in the evening, and later her daddy would lift the large tin bath from the hook on the back of the cellar door and fill it with buckets of water from the boiler and cold from the tap so that Kathy could bath the children and wash their hair. Lizzie loved her bath, though in the winter the cellar was freezing. Now that her daddy had got a job, he’d bought an old oil stove which stank like mad but at least made the place warmer.

Lizzie was particularly glad to have her hair washed if she’d had stuff put on it to kill the nits. Every Friday night she had to sit over a newspaper while her mother attacked her with the nit comb, and if any were found, smelly lotion had to be put on her hair, and on Danny’s too, and left all the next day, and it stank worse than the oil stove.

That Friday night, nothing had been found in Lizzie’s hair, but her mammy gave it a good washing anyway to make it shiny. Then she carried Danny upstairs, and Lizzie’s daddy came for her with a towel he’d been warming by the fire while her nightclothes were draped over the guard to air.

Lizzie glanced over at the communion dress hanging from the picture rail. She knew her mother had washed it and starched it before ironing it to take some of the limpness out, and it looked quite pretty really. Kathy knew something of her daughter’s feelings; she’d been the eldest in her family and had had a new communion dress that later had to do for both her sisters – Maggie, who was six years younger than her, and Carmel, the baby of the family – and the same with the confirmation dress a few years later. It would have been nice to get Lizzie a new one, but such a waste with Sheelagh’s just lying there. It wasn’t as if they had another girl in the family to pass it on to either, though there would be one more O’Malley before Christmas, for since her sex life with Barry had resumed in February, she’d not had a period.

‘Do you like it, pet?’ she asked Lizzie.

‘Yes, yes, I do, I just wish it hadn’t been our Sheelagh’s.’

‘Now, Lizzie.’ But Kathy, though she rebuked her daughter, knew what she meant for, God forgive her, she didn’t like the child either, and was less than keen on her mother, Bridie.

She often wished Pat wasn’t quite so easy-going, for he’d allowed himself to be led down the aisle by that Bridie Mulligan, and everyone knew what she was. Sheelagh was one in the same mould, and yet Pat was the gentlest, most considerate and pleasant man you could wish to meet.

There would be no more children in that family, if you could go by what Bridie had told her. After Matthew was born, three years after Sheelagh, she’d said Pat would have to tie a knot in it, for he was not getting near her again. Kathy had been shocked, because even though she and Barry were having their own problems, those were connected with Barry having no job. Yet Pat had been steadily employed, and Kathy was sure it was wrong to be cold-bloodedly planning your family that way; it might even be a sin. Still, Bridie could well look after her own immortal soul; Kathy had enough worries of her own.

Lizzie felt like a princess, and as she glanced along the row, she knew her dress was just as nice as all the other communicants’. She’d discovered that most girls with older sisters or cousins had handed-down dresses like hers, and not all the mothers had done such a good job as Kathy at making them look like new. And it was far better than having a dress loaned to you by the school, as some did if their families were really poor. Lizzie would have hated that.

Really, she thought, no one would have known her whole outfit wasn’t new, for the dress and veil were sparkling white and her daddy had put white stuff on the sandals to cover any scuff marks. Her mammy had bought new white socks in the end, for she said Sheelagh’s had gone a bit grey, and that morning she’d given Lizzie a missal with a white leather cover that was so beautiful to look at it was almost a shame to use it. Her grandma had given her a new rosary as she entered the church, and now she played it through her fingers and attempted to pray.

But she was too excited to concentrate and couldn’t help feeling sorry for the boys sitting the other side of the church, for all they had were the white sashes loaned to them by the school. Their shirts were white, of course, and she guessed a fair few were new, but they looked very drab next to the girls in all their finery.

Lizzie’s tummy rumbled as she’d known it would, for she’d not been able to have anything to eat or drink that morning as she was taking communion. It was only right, for she knew the little round tablet was not bread but the body and blood of Jesus Christ. It was a miracle, the priests said, that happened in the mass. It always made her feel a bit sick, that thought, but she never told anyone, they’d think her awful. She felt sick now too, waiting to take communion for the first time. Probably, she thought, it was because she was hungry, and she’d feel better when she had her breakfast in the school afterwards.

Lizzie knew the family would all be there for her that Sunday morning. In one way she was glad, but on the other hand, she knew that if she fidgeted too much, or looked round, or dropped her collection pennies, she’d catch it later. She knew where they all were, for out of the corner of her eye she’d seen her Auntie Maggie and Mammy and Daddy arrive with Danny between them, and all the others behind them. She glanced round once to smile, but her mammy made an impatient gesture with her hand that Lizzie knew meant for her to turn round and face the front. She did, but not before she saw Michael and Carmel, who Lizzie felt were too young to be called Uncle and Auntie, grinning back at her. Carmel was only twelve and could remember her own first communion; she knew how Lizzie would be feeling, and how her empty stomach would be churning at the enormity of it all.

Kathy watched all the earnest young communicants and hoped that it was a safe world they were growing up in. The news she listened to on the wireless at her parents’ house was disturbing, as it was in the newspaper Barry had taken to bringing home in the evening. She knew that there was great trouble in Germany. Barry had explained that Hitler seemed to want to own the whole of Europe, and they weren’t making guns in the quantities Barry said they were making them just to put in some vast storehouse. She said a fervent prayer for the safety of her family, especially Barry, Lizzie, Danny and the unborn child she was carrying, and as the strains of the organ filled the church and she stumbled to her feet for the first hymn, a chill of foreboding ran through her body.

TWO

Lizzie wasn’t sure exactly when she became aware over the summer holidays that something wasn’t right and that all the adults were worried. In the main, it was a holiday like any other; when the kids in the street got fed up of skipping and playing hopscotch and hide and seek and other street games, they would start to complain and fight and get under their mothers’ feet. Then Carmel and girls of similar age would be pressed into service to take the children off to Cannon Hill, or Calthorpe Park, with a couple of bottles of tea and jam sandwiches to stave off hunger till teatime. It had been Carmel’s lot to look after her cousins and their friends since she’d been nine years old, and much as she loved them, she often resented it. Sometimes she thought it was no good having a holiday if all you did all day was mind weans. She also knew it was no good saying anything about it and that lots of girls were in the same boat, so she usually went without complaining.

Lizzie thought at first that everyone was worried about her Auntie Rose, who was on her time again and little Pete only just two and Grandma said she was not having it easy. Then she thought it might be the row going on because her Auntie Maggie wanted to marry Con Murray and Grandma and Grandad wouldn’t have it. Not only was he just a bookie’s runner and not good enough, in their opinion, for Maggie, but he’d been put in prison for it too, and Grandad said no daughter of his would marry a jail bird.

Later, at home, she heard her parents discussing it. Barry said Con wasn’t a jail bird really; all he did was place bets, and he at least felt sorry for him, he only did it because he couldn’t get a decent job.

‘It doesn’t matter what you say, Daddy won’t let her marry him,’ Kathy said. ‘He can’t provide for her properly as a bookie’s runner.’

‘I couldn’t provide for you for many years,’ Barry reminded her.

‘Aye, but you could when I married you,’ Kathy said. ‘And you’d never been inside.’

‘No, but I can’t blame the man, not totally,’ Barry said. ‘Anyway, so I hear it, when the men are put away, the firm, the people he places bets for, see to his family.’

‘Oh, I’ll tell Daddy that,’ Kathy said sarcastically. ‘I’m sure it will make all the difference! He’d have a fit if he thought his daughter, and possibly grandchildren, was being kept from starvation by people he’d consider not far removed from gangsters. Couldn’t you ask round at your place?’ she appealed. ‘Maybe Con could get set on there?’

Barry shook his head. ‘I doubt it, but I’ll ask. In the meantime they’ll have to wait. After all, once Maggie is twenty-one, she can do as she pleases.’

Kathy wondered if her headstrong young sister would be prepared to wait, for she was just nineteen, and two years seemed a lifetime away. Only the other day, she’d said to Kathy in a voice laced with a veiled threat, ‘I could always force their hand, you know.’

‘Don’t be a bloody fool,’ Kathy had snapped. ‘Don’t suggest bringing a child into this mess till you have something sorted.’ She looked at her sister and asked, tentatively, ‘You haven’t…you don’t…’

Maggie had tossed her mane of black hair so like her elder sister’s, flashed her eyes that had a greenish tinge to them and snapped, ‘That’s my business.’

‘Maggie, you’ll get your name up.’

‘Don’t be such a fool. Con loves me.’

‘You’re the fool! If he loved you, he’d wait.’

‘Till when? Till we’re drawing the old age pension?’

‘Oh, Maggie,’ Kathy cried. ‘Be careful.’

‘I am careful,’ Maggie said. ‘I’m just saying that if Mammy and Daddy keep being awkward, then I might not be so careful, that’s all. We’re not made of stone, we can’t wait forever.’

Lizzie knew that her family were worried about Maggie and Con, who went arm-in-arm down the street together. But she also knew that it wasn’t just these ordinary worries that gave everyone the serious look to their faces; it was something more. They’d gather at Grandma Sullivan’s to hear the news on the wireless broadcasts and talk about someone called Hitler, Chamberlain and Czechoslovakia. It was a while before Lizzie realised Czechoslovakia was a country and not a person’s name, and that Hitler wanted to dominate it.

Her daddy, who seemed to know more about the situation than the others from the reading he’d done during his time of unemployment, feared that war, at least between Czechoslovakia and Germany, was inevitable. ‘Whether we’ll just stand by and watch this time is the question,’ he said.

‘Like we did when he marched into Austria, you mean?’ Pat asked.

‘Right,’ her daddy said. ‘The Anschluss he called it, but whatever name he puts on it, Austria ceased to exist from March this year. It’s become another part of Germany, and Czechoslovakia will be next, and if Britain do what they’ve done so far, it will be bugger all.’

‘He won’t be finished till he has the whole of Europe,’ Eamonn commented.

‘Aye, you’re right,’ Lizzie heard her daddy say. ‘And we’re allowing him to. That’s not all, though. Some desperate tales are coming from those places about the terrible things he’s doing to the Jews. I think the man has a screw loose and is a sadistic sod into the bargain.’

Lizzie felt her eyes widen. Her daddy had said two bad words, and it seemed to be catching, for she heard her Uncle Pat ask angrily, ‘What the hell do you expect us to do, Barry? Go over there and bloody well stop the whole of the German army?’

‘It might come to that, aye, it might.’

Mary said quietly, ‘You mean war?’

‘I mean just that.’

‘Dear God!’

Suddenly the room was very quiet. Everyone was looking at Barry, and even Kathy was viewing her husband with new eyes. He spoke with some authority, as if he knew what he was talking about, though the subject of the talk chilled her to the marrow.

‘Look,’ Barry said, ‘we can either let this bugger Hitler march into country after country, killing Jews and anyone else who disagrees with him on the way, or we’ve got to stop him. I think those are the only two choices.’

No one disagreed, but everyone hoped he might be wrong, that something would happen to avert the war Barry could see them heading straight for.

For a time, it seemed hopeful, for the prime minister, Chamberlain, took a hand in proceedings to promote peace at any price, and everyone was optimistic again. Barry, though, wasn’t convinced. He read the papers avidly, and even suggested to Kathy that they buy a wireless set, but she didn’t give out to him and said they had plenty of other things to buy before that. Instead, she said he should keep his eye out for a second-hand one.

The day Barry brought a wireless home, just a week or so later, was one of great excitement. It was even bigger than their grandad’s, Lizzie noticed, and there was hardly room for it in the fireplace alcove by the door down to the cellar. The accumulator, which Barry would have to have charged up at the garage in Bristol Street, sat beside it, and Lizzie and Danny and all the neighbours who had crowded in to see couldn’t wait to hear something come out of the polished wooden box.

The children soon had their favourites. Both enjoyed Children’s Hour, where Uncle Mac told them the stories of Toytown. They particularly liked Larry the Lamb and Denis the Dachshund and the tricks they got up to together, and they booed enthusiastically when the villain, Mr Crowser, came into the story. Uncle Peter read stories and poems and played the piano, but Lizzie preferred Uncle Mac and was always sorry when she heard him say, ‘Goodnight, children everywhere.’

But then there was always Radio Normandy, which told the tale of Flossie, a naughty girl who went to Dr Whacken’s School, which made everyone laugh. The very best of all, though, was Radio Luxemburg and the Ovaltineys. Lizzie, Danny, Maura Mahon and others would settle down on Sunday evening to listen to it. Many of the children in the street joined the club, and got a badge and a rule book, and on the programme they used to give out a message in code that the children had to break. Maura and Lizzie would puzzle over it and then help Danny, who hadn’t a clue what a code was.

It became one of their favourite games, sending messages in code, and they all knew the Ovaltineys’ song and sang it together every time the programme came on.

Kathy and Barry were pleased the children enjoyed the wireless so much, but its only value to them was to find out what was happening in the world, and they really only listened to the news. Lizzie couldn’t understand it. ‘Why don’t you listen to music like Grandma?’ she said. ‘She likes the BBC Variety Orchestra and Victor Sylvester, but Carmel likes Tune In from Radio Luxemburg with Jack Payne and his band better. They’re good, Mammy.’

‘I haven’t time to listen to music,’ Kathy said dismissively.

Lizzie knew she made time to listen to the news all right and that was deadly boring. It was very puzzling altogether.

What wasn’t puzzling was when her cousin Sheelagh, catty as normal, attacked her one day as the children were playing in the street together.

‘My mammy says your daddy’s a warmonger,’ she said.

‘He is not.’ Lizzie didn’t know what a warmonger was, but it didn’t sound very nice.

‘He is. She says he likes going round scaring people.’

‘He doesn’t, and anyway he doesn’t scare people.’

‘He might, going round saying there’s going to be a war all the time,’ Sheelagh said. ‘My mammy says people like him should be locked up.’

Lizzie bounced on the pavement in temper. ‘Don’t you dare say that about my daddy.’

‘I can say what I like, it’s a free country.’

‘I hate you, Sheelagh Sullivan.’

‘I’ve always hated you, Lizzie up-the-pole O’Malley, and you’re stupid and so’s your precious daddy.’

The slap took Sheelagh by surprise, and she staggered back holding her hand to her face, where the mark of Lizzie’s fingers showed scarlet streaks on her pale cheek. ‘You! You…!’ she screamed, as angry tears spouted out of her eyes. ‘I’m telling me mammy about you.’

Aunt Bridie came round later, shouting about it. Lizzie had slunk home and was buried in a chair with a book, but was yanked out of it by her mother to stand before her furious aunt. ‘Auntie Bridie says you slapped Sheelagh across the face,’ Kathy accused her.

Lizzie was silent, and Bridie said angrily, ‘Insolent little sod. Answer when you’re spoken to.’

‘I’ll deal with this,’ Kathy snapped, tight-lipped, and then she went for Lizzie herself. ‘Well, did you, or didn’t you?’

Lizzie, knowing denial was useless, said, ‘Yes, I did, but she said—’

Her attempt at an explanation was thwarted, for Bridie leapt in. ‘There, what did I tell you? You should see the mark on my Sheelagh’s face. Child should be walloped for that.’

‘How many times have I told you not to fight with Sheelagh?’ Kathy shouted, ignoring Bridie. ‘How many times?’

Lizzie shook her head dumbly, and Kathy grasped her shoulders and shook her soundly. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘maybe this will remind you.’ And she delivered two ringing slaps to the back of Lizzie’s legs. Tears sprang to Lizzie’s eyes, but she wouldn’t let them fall. She looked defiantly at her Auntie Bridie, but said nothing until Kathy, terrified lest she say anything that would cause her to be punished again, grabbed her and ordered harshly, ‘Go and get into bed. Go on! Before I give you another one, and there’ll be no supper for you tonight.’

Much later, after Lizzie had cried so much her pillow was damp, her father came in with a mug of cocoa and a hunk of bread and jam. ‘I couldn’t have you hungry,’ he said, and though he must have noticed the red-rimmed eyes, he made no comment about them. ‘Want to tell me about it, pet?’

Lizzie nodded and recounted the row to her father, and at the end of it he said, ‘Well, don’t tell your mother, let it be a secret between us two, but I don’t blame you one bit.’

‘You don’t?’

‘No, but next time don’t let her get to you. What is she anyway but a bag of wind?’

‘Oh, Daddy.’ The tears were falling again, and Barry said, ‘No more of that now. Eat up your supper. Danny will be up in a wee while and I’ll tell your mammy you’re sorry, shall I?’

‘You can tell her,’ Lizzie said flatly. ‘But I’m not really.’

Barry winked and said, ‘We’ll keep that a secret too, I think.’

Lizzie wished the priests were like her father, for she imagined that when she told it in confession – because she knew she’d have to tell – they’d take a very dim view of it altogether.

Downstairs, Barry explained to Kathy what the row had been about.

‘Oh, how I hated to smack her,’ Kathy said, ‘and in front of that woman too, but I had to do something. Lizzie admitted hitting the child. If it had been anyone else it wouldn’t have mattered so much.’

‘It wouldn’t happen to anyone else. No one gets our Lizzie going like Sheelagh,’ Barry said. ‘And the child’s got a tongue on her like her mother, but our Lizzie’s sorry now.’

A little later, when Kathy took Danny to bed, she said to Lizzie, ‘Daddy’s told me all about it and we’ll say no more. I’m pleased you’re sorry for what you did. I want you to try not to be such a bold girl in future, will you do that?’

‘Yes, Mammy,’ Lizzie said, and was glad of the dimness of the room that hid her smile.

Czechoslovakia was suddenly the name on everyone’s lips, and some of the family and neighbours came round to the O’Malley house each evening now to listen to the news. Even easy-going Pat and his father, Eamonn, had begun to realise there was reason for concern, as had Michael, now a good friend of Barry’s. Sean was the last of the men in the family to become aware that things were serious, but then his energies and worries were with his wife, Rose, who’d given birth to a little girl in mid-August but hadn’t seemed to pick up as she should have done.

The children were back at school when the news came through about Hitler demanding control of the Sudeten area of Czechoslovakia. He claimed that three and half million German-speaking people there were being discriminated against by the Czech government. Kathy and Barry were by themselves early one evening, and Barry read the news out of the paper as Kathy sat knitting for the new baby, due in November.

‘He might be satisfied with that, then?’ Kathy asked hopefully, but she sensed Barry’s unease.

He gave a grunt of disgust. ‘Satisfied?’ he repeated. ‘He’ll not be happy till he has the whole of Europe. I don’t believe a thing the bugger says, Kathy, and neither should anyone with any sense.’

Chamberlain didn’t share Barry’s views and prevailed on the Czech government to make concessions to prevent a German invasion. When Chamberlain and the French prime minister, Daladier, met with Hitler in Munich on 29 September 1938, they agreed to Germany occupying the Sudetenland after guaranteeing the rest of Czechoslovakia safe from attack.

As Chamberlain arrived back waving his piece of paper and declaring, ‘I believe it is peace for our time,’ many were lulled into a false sense of security that war had been averted. Barry was not one of them.

However, he hadn’t time to worry about it much, for in October, six weeks early, Kathy gave birth to a little boy. He was baptised Seamus and lived only for four days. Kathy was inconsolable for some time and her mother took over caring for her and Barry, as well as the children.

Mary, worried as she was about Kathy, was worried still further by Sean and Rose and their wee girl, Nuala. Then there was Maggie, who, seeing the advantage of her mother’s time and energy being diverted elsewhere, was out till all hours and probably up to God alone knows what mischief with Con Murray.

Only Bridie seemed unaffected by anything. ‘You’d think she’d help a bit,’ Mary complained angrily to Eamonn one night. ‘After all, the weans are off her hands at school all day, and yet never a hand’s turn does she do for anybody.’

‘Ah well, sure, that’s Bridie for you.’

And that was Bridie, that was the trouble, concerned only for her own welfare and that of her children. She was jealous of Kathy and Barry and always had been, and it was all because of their house. Pat and Bridie lived in a communal courtyard, criss-crossed with washing lines. The yard also housed the dustbins, shared toilets and the brew or wash house. Kathy and Barry’s house, on the other hand, opened on to the street, and had two doors, the second one on to the entry that led to the yard Bridie lived in. It had a large cellar lit with gas mantles and a huge white sink underneath a grating with a cold water tap. That tap meant Kathy could do her own washing in her own house. She even had a gas boiler beside the sink to boil the whites, and there was still plenty of room to get the bath down from the hook on the back of the door and fill it up for the children’s weekly bath.

Mary thought them lucky to have the house, but she imagined they’d more than earned it. After their marriage they had lodged there with Barry’s gran, who was the tenant. No sooner were they in than the old lady, seeing someone there to fetch and carry for her, took to her bed, and Kathy had a time of it, especially when she was expecting Lizzie.

Then the old lady became senile and began accusing Kathy of trying to poison her, and yet Kathy didn’t lose patience, telling Mary she was just an old lady terrified of being put in the workhouse. When they got the house afterwards, Mary was pleased for them and Kathy said that in many ways she missed the old lady. Bridie, though, could never be happy for someone else’s good fortune.

Mary sighed. Pat really deserved a medal for putting up with it all the way he did, but just now her energies had to go to Kathy, for the baby’s death had knocked her badly and it was beginning to affect the whole family.

Kathy wouldn’t even go to the bonfire down the yard on Guy Fawkes night, but sat huddled over the fire as if she were cold. She said she didn’t feel up to it. In the end Eamonn went out and bought fireworks for the weans and Mary cooked the sausages to share, as was the custom, and Barry went down to keep an eye on the weans and let off the fireworks.

When they returned, they were sticky, smoke-grimed and tired, but happier than they’d been since their little brother had died. Mary, who’d been keeping Kathy company, decided the time had come for a straight talk with her daughter. When the weans were tucked in bed and Barry dispatched to the pub with the men, she began. ‘Kathy, you can’t grieve forever, love. God knows it’s hard, pet, but you have two other weans to see to.’

‘Lord, don’t I know it!’ Kathy cried. ‘But Mammy, I can’t.’

‘You can and you must,’ Mary said firmly. ‘The weans miss you.’

‘Sure, they have me.’ But they hadn’t, and Kathy knew that as well as her mother. They had a shadow of their old mammy, one with no substance and no life. And as for Barry, as far as Kathy was concerned, he might as well not have existed.

Kathy did try, but it was not until after the start of 1939 that she began to feel anything like herself. Even then she avoided Rose, as looking at the chubby, smiling Nuala was like a dagger in her heart. Danny began school in January, although he wasn’t five until March. She’d hadn’t even to leave him at the school, or collect him. ‘Lizzie’s well able to take him,’ Mary said firmly, and she was right. Lizzie, now turned seven and a half, was proud to take her young brother along Bristol Street and into Bow Street, where the school was.

While the O’Malleys were coming to terms with the loss of their child, the Czechs were just beginning to realise that in agreeing to Hitler’s demands, they had lost seventy per cent of their heavy industry. Slovakia, feeling let down by their government, demanded semi-independence. Fearing a revolt, and with the country in total disarray, President Hacha requested Germany’s help ‘to restore order’. German troops took possession of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. Britain and France complained, but did nothing; Hitler claimed he’d not invaded but been invited in, and turned his attention to Poland and, in particular, the city of Danzig.

Every night Barry would listen to the news reports, usually with Pat, often with young Michael and occasionally with Sean too. For a long time they’d discuss the news items together before dispersing.

No one now tried to convince themselves that the world wasn’t at crisis point. Barry and Michael had been making anti-tank rifles, and now they’d been put on to making Browning 303 machine guns. No one objected to the long hours put in; everyone seemed to realise it was a race against time, and there was a sense of inevitability during the spring and summer of that year.

The summer holidays dawned wet, miserable and dull, but when July gave way to August there was a heat wave and the temperatures were sometimes the highest they’d been for thirty years. ‘I wish we could go to the seaside,’ Lizzie complained one day to Carmel, who agreed. They’d never been but had heard it was grand.

The pavements seemed to radiate the heat, so that it shimmered above them and they were dustier than ever. Lizzie sat on the step and watched three little boys building dust castles, which they then destroyed with their toy cars, making a great deal of noise about it. Others huddled in groups over piles of marbles. One little girl, younger than Lizzie, pushed a pram with a fractious baby inside, while a bit further down the street, two older girls wielded a long, heavy rope while another girl skipped inside the loop. Lizzie wondered how they could be so energetic. She was so hot, her clothes were sticking to her body. ‘If we went to Cannon Hill Park, we could paddle at the sides of the lake,’ she suggested. ‘If Mammy would let us.’

‘We’d have to take Sheelagh and Matt too, at least,’ Carmel said.

‘Couldn’t we go on our own just once?’

‘You know full well we couldn’t.’ Carmel was older and wiser than her niece. ‘Sure, Bridie would play war if she found out.’

Suddenly Lizzie wasn’t sure if she wanted to go, and have Sheelagh goading and sneering at her. She wasn’t sure whether it wasn’t a better prospect to stay in the hot street and swelter. But in the end she went, and her mammy and Auntie Rose went too.

Kathy was also feeling restless and unsettled and a day out with the children was maybe just what she needed. Also she thought she’d ignored Rose’s baby daughter long enough; sure, it wasn’t Rose or Sean’s fault her baby had died.

They sat on a grassy incline overlooking the lake and watched the ducks and swans swimming between the circling rowing boats. The children had stripped to the bare minimum, as had many others, and were squealing and giggling as they played together. Nuala was practising the new art of walking and now and again would tumble over and chuckle to herself.

‘It’s hard to believe dreadful things are going on in other parts of the world on a day like this,’ Kathy remarked.

‘I know Sean’s really worried. Is Barry?’

‘Everyone’s worried. God, Rose, what if war comes and our husbands are called up and there are enemy planes in the sky?’

‘You don’t think it can be averted?’

‘Not now, it’s too late,’ Kathy said. ‘We heard it on the news, Hitler wants the town of Danzig, and if it’s given up to German control he has a corridor straight through to Prussia, cutting off Poland’s access to the sea. I don’t see them agreeing to it, do you?’

Rose shook her head sadly. She looked at her little boy Pete, now a sturdy three-year-old, and Nuala still a baby, and shivered, and yet she believed her sister-in-law. Sean said Barry had a better grasp of the world situation than many of the politicians, which came from all the reading he’d done while he was on the dole.

It was as the women and children made their way home that they came upon men digging trenches. ‘What are they doing?’ Danny asked.

Rose and Kathy exchanged glances. Everyone was aware of the policy of digging trenches in parks and other open spaces; it had been on the news, but to actually see it being done was dreadful.

‘What will they have us do? Cower in the mud like rats?’ Bridie had said scathingly.

‘Well, it will surely be better than nothing if you’re caught in a raid,’ Pat had retorted.

Kathy knew her brother was right and, as war was inevitable, and everyone knew that this time civilians everywhere would be targeted too, she should have felt reassured seeing the trenches being dug. Instead it filled her with dread. But she had to answer her small son. ‘They’re just digging,’ she said shortly.

Danny walked to the rim of the trench to look in. The two men digging were stripped to the waist, their backs gleaming with sweat. One of them grinned up at him and all the children began edging forward to see.

‘Come on now,’ Kathy snapped.

The children, even wee Pete, took no notice and edged closer to look in.

‘Pete,’ Rose called warningly. ‘Come on.’

Pete turned and looked but didn’t move, and when Carmel attempted to pull him towards his mother, he began to shout and struggle.

‘Come away out of that, the lot of you,’ Kathy yelled impatiently, and the children came reluctantly, all except Danny. He continued to stare at one of the men, who suddenly rubbed his dirty hand across his brow. Danny was very envious. He thought it would be great to do work like that – fancy being able to dig all day long!

‘Danny!’

Danny ignored his mother and rubbed his hand across his brow, imitating the man, who leant on his shovel and gave a bellow of laughter.

‘Just a minute, Mammy.’

‘I will not “just a minute”, my lad,’ Kathy said, marching over and grabbing her son by the arm. ‘For once in your life you’ll do as you’re bloody well told.’

‘Ah, missus,’ said the man in the trench, understanding Kathy’s mood far better than Danny did. ‘Let’s hope they’re not needed.’

‘Yes indeed,’ said Kathy, dragging her protesting son away. She couldn’t wait to get them home.

‘Mr Brady came from the school,’ Bridie told Kathy later that night. ‘While you were away at the park.’

‘They’re on holiday, what did he want anyway?’ she asked, surprised. The headmaster had called round: he’d never done such a thing before.

‘He was talking about the evacuation programme.’

‘They’re not being evacuated,’ Kathy said firmly. ‘I talked it over with Barry. I’ve got the cellar and I’m not sending my weans to live with strangers.’

‘Me neither. I told him I’d come into your cellar if there were air raids.’

Kathy knew she would, and however she felt about her sister-in-law, she couldn’t deny her shelter if the bombs came. ‘What did he say?’ she asked.

‘Well, he wasn’t pleased. He said the government wanted to empty the cities of children, but it had to be our decision.’

‘I wonder how many will go,’ Kathy said. ‘I mean, I wonder if they’ll close the school.’

‘Surely to God they can’t do that, they can’t leave our children running mad through the streets.’

‘We’ll have to wait and see,’ Kathy said.

It was Lizzie who brought it up next. ‘Mammy, Maura’s going to the country.’

‘I know.’

‘Can I go?’

‘No you can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because, that’s why,’ Kathy snapped.

‘That’s not a proper answer, Mammy.’

‘Lizzie, do you want a slap?’

Lizzie looked at her mother reproachfully and Kathy reddened. She’d overreacted, surely. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I don’t want you away with strangers. You’re only eight, and Danny’s just five.’

Lizzie looked at her mother and saw her fear, but didn’t fully understand it. She didn’t know what the country was, she’d never been, but Maura had made it sound fun, and she said that if Lizzie stayed at home, she’d be blown up. Lizzie wouldn’t have minded going away for a while – well, as long as it wasn’t for too long and she could look after Danny.

Suddenly she remembered her little brother Seamus; how her mammy had lost him and how ill she’d been over it, and she thought that must be it – she and Danny couldn’t leave their mammy because their baby brother had died. She was even more convinced of it when her mammy put an arm around her and said, ‘I don’t know what I’d do without the pair of you, and that’s God’s truth, especially if your daddy gets called up.’

Then Lizzie knew she had to stay with her mother, and she’d explain it to Danny, and if they were blown up at least they’d be blown up together.

The priest thought that was the reason too. Father Cunningham had been a regular visitor after Seamus died and had eventually encouraged Kathy back to mass. Father Flaherty was a different kind of man altogether, and he sat in the easy chair as if he owned the place, while Kathy ran round feeding him tea and biscuits.

‘I’m glad to see you’re over that other business at last,’ he said.

That other business! He was my son, Kathy thought, but the years of having manners drummed into her held firm, so she said nothing.

‘Now,’ Father Flaherty went on, ‘you must protect the children you have.’

‘I intend to, Father.’

‘Oh, then you’ve changed your mind about evacuation? I was talking to Mr Brady, and he…’

‘No, Father, no I haven’t,’ Kathy said. ‘But you see, I don’t understand how sending them off to live with strangers is any way to be looking after them.’

‘And if the bombs come, what then?’

‘At least we’ll be together, Father, and my weans will have their mammy beside them, not some stranger, however safe the place.’

‘They won’t be alone. Many have chosen to send their children away.’

‘That’s their choice, Father. This is mine and Barry’s.’

‘It’s because of the wee one you lost,’ Father Flaherty said with authority. ‘You’re overprotective of the two you have left. It’s understandable, but you must think of the children, not of yourselves.’

Kathy’s eyes flashed. ‘Father, it really is our business, and why I don’t want them to go is just between me and Barry.’

‘That’s your final word?’

‘It is.’

When the priest had gone, Kathy had set down on a chair, her legs trembling, for she’d never stood up to the man before. She knew he was a priest, but God forgive her, she couldn’t like him, there was something about him that made her skin crawl.

Almost a week later, the lovely weather broke in Birmingham. Thick black clouds had rolled in and the air was heavy. ‘Going to be a storm,’ people said. ‘We need one to clear the air.’ Kathy looked at the purple-tinged sky and agreed. Her head felt muzzy and she knew she’d probably end up with a headache.

But when the storm came, the ferocity and intensity of it shocked everyone. For three hours the lightning flashed and the thunder roared and rumbled. Rain hammered and bounced on the dusty pavements till they gleamed and streamed with water. The newscaster said Staffordshire had had the worst of it, and Kathy looked out at the depth of water outside, far too much for the gurgling gutters to cope with, and felt sorry for those worse off.

The news that night, though, wiped out worries about the weather, for there had been heavy troop movement from Austria to Slovakia and fanning out along the Polish border. Seventy Polish Jewish children arrived in Britain, where they would stay with foster parents until they were eighteen.

‘Poor little devils,’ Kathy said. ‘They’re coming to strange people, strange language and strange ways. It must have been a wrench for the parents, for they might never see them again.’

‘At least this way they’ve got a chance,’ Barry said. ‘Hitler’s record with Jewish people is not good. Oh, and thinking about children reminds me, have you picked up the gas masks yet?’

Kathy flushed. The very thought of putting one of those strange contraptions on her children terrified her. But then she remembered what had happened to her father, his lungs permanently damaged with the mustard gas he’d inhaled in the Great War. She knew she’d have to overcome her fear if there was gas about – to protect her children, at least. ‘In this downpour?’ she said indignantly to cover her unease, and added, ‘I’ll go up tomorrow.’

‘See you do,’ Barry said. ‘It’s as well to be prepared.’

It seemed everyone was getting prepared, for on the news the next day they heard that Paris had begun evacuating people, children first, and the Poles had issued a call-up to all men under forty. At home, the government issued guidelines on what to do in an air raid, black-out restrictions were about to come into force and Kathy and her neighbours were kept busy making shutters and curtains for their windows.

By Thursday, the navy had been mobilised, and working on the assumption that fire could cause as much damage as bombs, people were urged to clear their lofts and attics of junk and keep a bucket of sand or dirt on every landing.

On Friday the children who were being evacuated left from the school. Lizzie went with her mother and Danny to watch them marching out of the playground. In the event there were not many of them, twenty or twenty-five or so, Kathy thought, together with two teachers. The children had haversacks on their backs, or suitcases or carriers in their hands, gas masks in cardboard boxes slung around their necks and labels pinned to their coats. They were singing ‘Run, Rabbit, Run’ and waving and shouting like mad as they got into the waiting buses to take them to Moor Street Station. It all looked tremendous fun. Lizzie wished, just for a moment, that she was going too. But she knew her mammy needed her.

On the news that night, they learnt that German tanks had invaded Poland. The towns of Krakow, Teschan and Katowice were bombed before dawn, and Warsaw suffered a heavy bombardment and had many, many casualties. Chamberlain issued an ultimatum to Hitler to pull out of Poland or face the consequences, but Hitler had not replied.

‘This is it,’ Barry said, and indeed it was. The call-up of men under forty-one would begin immediately and the black-out became law.

‘Bloody right,’ Pat said. ‘They can’t back down now.’

‘Well, why don’t they declare war and be done with it?’ Sean said. ‘Rather than all this pussy-footing around, we should have taken Hitler out long ago.’

‘Oh, listen to the big boys,’ Bridie sneered. ‘Jesus, when they have you all in uniform, you can go over there and show the others how it’s done.’

‘Be quiet, Bridie,’ Pat said quietly.

Bridie bristled. ‘Oh well, if I can’t express an opinion, I’ll be away home.’

‘Ah, stay a while,’ Kathy said. Really she wished Bridie far enough away, but fearing Pat would get the rough edge of her tongue later, she said, ‘Have a drop of tea before you go.’

‘No,’ Bridie said. ‘I’ve got Sadie next door giving an ear to the weans and she likes me to pop in with the news, so I’ll be off now.’ She looked across at Pat and said sharply, ‘And you be in at a reasonable hour.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Pat in a fake American accent, and gave her a salute.

Bridie glared at him and slammed the entry door, and Pat remarked to no one in particular, ‘Should have her in the bloody army, if you ask me. She’d make a good general.’

Kathy spluttered over her tea, but she said nothing. She had wondered if Pat ever got fed up of his wife’s constant carping, but he’d never said anything about her before. Pat met his sister’s eyes over the wireless and smiled at her as he reached for his coat.

‘Are you away?’ Barry asked.

‘Aye, but not home,’ Pat said. ‘Bridie can order all she likes, but I’ll go home when I’m ready. I’m away to The Bell.’

‘Wait,’ Barry said. ‘I’ll come along with you.’ He glanced over at Kathy and said, ‘OK?’

‘Fine, but I’ll likely be in bed when you get in,’ Kathy said. ‘I’m beat.’

‘You on, Sean?’

‘You bet, lead the way.’

When they’d left, Kathy sat thinking. She wasn’t tired really, but she was depressed. She faced the fact that in a day, two days, bombs could be raining down on England’s cities, killing, destroying and maiming. Her husband and brothers would be there in the thick of it, and she began to shake with a fear deeper than any she’d experienced so far.

Saturday’s news bulletin depressed Kathy further. Poland was fighting for its life. Many towns and cities had been attacked, with heavy civilian casualties, and even an evacuation train carrying women and children had been blown up. It seemed no one could stop the German monster sweeping Europe, and Kathy wondered if Britain would be strong enough. The only cheering news was that the Empire was on their side: Australian troops had arrived in Britain, New Zealand had promised support and Canadian forces were being mobilised. A report from the prime minister was promised in the morning.

That night in bed, Barry said, ‘This is it, old girl, you know. After tomorrow, life will never be the same again.’

‘I know.’

‘I knew it was coming, but I wish to God I’d been wrong.’

‘I know that too.’ Kathy gave a sniff.

‘You’re not crying, are you?’

‘A bit,’ Kathy answered with another sniff. ‘Isn’t a war worth crying over?’

Barry gave a laugh. ‘I’m damned if you ain’t right,’ he said. ‘But for now, what are you going to give your husband to make up for the fact he’ll not be sharing your bed for much longer?’

Kathy smiled and said, ‘I’m sure I’ll think of something.’

THREE

After all the storms, Sunday 3 September 1939 dawned sunny and warm, a perfect late summer’s day. Kathy was up early and got breakfast just for Danny, as everyone else would be taking communion. ‘The broadcast is at eleven, isn’t it?’ she asked Barry.

‘Aye, and you can bet every person in this land will be listening in, and we’ll be no exception.’

The church was fuller than usual and Kathy wondered if they were all praying as fervently as she was. Peace was out of the window now, and Kathy sat head in hands, almost overcome with sadness at it all. There was little chattering in the porch that day, everyone wanted to be away home to get the dinner on so they could listen to the broadcast.

Just before it began, Kathy was startled by how still it had become outside. She glanced out of the window. The streets were deserted, no baby cried, no toddler shrieked or chuckled, and no dog barked. Even the children seemed to know what an historic moment it was, for they’d picked up the atmosphere from the seriousness of the adults. So many people were crowded into the O’Malleys’ house that Lizzie and Danny, as usual, had crawled under the table, but even amongst such a mass of people there was an uneasy silence, and Kathy realised she could hear no tram rattling along Bristol Street, nor the drone of the occasional car or the clop of horses’ hooves. It was as if the world was holding its breath, waiting, and then they heard the dreaded words.

‘I am speaking to you from the cabinet room of Ten Downing Street. This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by eleven o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now, no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently, this country is at war with Germany.’

For a moment there was silence, and then everyone began speaking at once, saying that it was only to be expected and that the Jerries needed teaching a lesson. Underneath the table, Lizzie told Danny, ‘We’re at war.’

‘What’s that?’

Lizzie wasn’t sure, but no way was she going to admit it. ‘Oh, it means there are lots of soldiers about,’ she said. ‘And guns and bombs and things, and Daddy might have to go away and fight bad people.’

‘Oh,’ said Danny, mightily impressed.

People were dispersing back to their own homes, Lizzie noticed, peeping out from between the chair legs, until there was just Auntie Bridie and Uncle Pat with Sheelagh and Matt between them.

‘Well,’ Pat said, looking across at Barry, ‘I’m away for a pint.’

They exchanged a look that Kathy didn’t really understand then, and Bridie snapped scornfully, ‘Away for a pint? Any excuse for a drink, you. It’s nothing to bloody well celebrate.’

‘Oh, let them go,’ Kathy said despondently. ‘I’m away to Mammy’s anyway. She’ll feel it badly, and Daddy too, with them both remembering the Great War so well. Are you coming?’

Bridie shrugged. ‘Might as well. We won’t see the pair of them till closing time.’

We might, Kathy thought, if you moaned less about it, but she said nothing.

Rose was already at the Sullivans’ house when Kathy arrived with Bridie and the children, Sean having gone with the other men. ‘They called for Michael,’ Mary said. ‘And that bloody Maggie’s slipped out somewhere.’

Only Carmel was left, and she suddenly looked very young and vulnerable. ‘All right?’ Kathy said.

‘I suppose,’ Carmel said uncertainly, with a slight shrug, and then she asked, ‘What’s it all mean, Kathy, will there be bombs and things?’

‘Maybe,’ Kathy said. ‘But don’t worry, you’ve got a stout cellar like ours. We’ll be fine.’

How easy it was, thought Kathy, to reassure children. Not so easy to reassure adults, and she noticed for the first time that her mother’s jet-black hair that she’d passed on to her three daughters and her youngest son was liberally streaked with grey, and deep lines scored her face.

There were tears in Mary’s eyes and Kathy was shocked, for she’d never seen her mother cry before. ‘Ah, Mammy, don’t upset yourself.’

‘What’s the use of crying over it at all?’ Eamonn said, almost roughly. ‘Wasn’t the last one supposed to be the war to end all wars, and what did I get out of it but buggered-up lungs and a partitioned Ireland?’

Kathy felt a lump in her throat. She’d heard this before, but it had never seemed to mean that much. All men of her father’s time would probably feel betrayed, she thought, all those who had fought through the carnage, the blood and the mud of the trenches to make a land fit for heroes. As for the Irish, who had fought in order to obtain home rule for their country, it was even worse, because at the end of it all they’d only gained control of twenty-six of the thirty-two counties.

Disillusioned, and with no wish to return to his native soil, for his home in Beleek, Fermanagh, was still under British rule, Eamonn Sullivan and his wife Mary had settled with their two sons and one daughter in Edgbaston, Birmingham. His chest had a constant wheeze and rattle and he could do little without getting breathless. Kathy had never worried much about it; it had been like that all the years of her growing up. Once she’d asked her mother what was wrong with her daddy and had been told that the unit he was in had been gassed in the war, and that it had wrecked his lungs.

Mary knew that Eamonn, fit only for light duties, would have found it hard getting a job in that bleak time if it hadn’t been for the fact that he’d saved an officer’s life in France in 1915 by dragging him across the sludge of Flanders to the relative safety of a dugout. The injured officer had proved to be the son of the owner of a small button factory, based in Duddeston, a Mr Charles Sallenger.

Sallenger had sent five sons to the front, and one by one they’d all died, except for the youngest, Henry, saved by the young Irishman. The man’s gratitude was sincere and touching, and when Henry explained about Eamonn’s lungs, eaten away with gas, he was given a light job and knew he was set for life, and all because he’d been in the right place at the right time.

Now, however, Eamonn felt old and tired, and he looked it. Kathy was quite worried about him. Like Mary, his hair – or at least the bits he still had at the sides – was grey; the only trouble was, his face was the same colour, and he had deep pouches under his eyes, while the skin on his cheeks and around his mouth had begun to sag.

‘Didn’t you fancy a pint, Daddy?’ she asked softly.

‘No, child, I’d be no company for anyone this day,’ Eamonn said sadly. ‘I let the young ones go.’

‘Don’t need much of an excuse, do they?’ Bridie said with a nod at Kathy. ‘Any excuse for a drink.’

‘They’ll be talking over the declaration from this morning,’ Kathy said. ‘It’s what they always do, you know that.’

‘Talking, my arse. Tipping it down their necks, more like.’

‘Oh, Bridie, give over,’ Kathy said. ‘We’ve a lot to be thankful for in our husbands.’

‘Speak for your bloody self.’

Stung at the implied criticism of her favourite brother, Kathy snapped, ‘Pat’s a good man and a good provider. I don’t know why you’re always on at him.’

‘Oh, of course, you won’t hear a bloody word against him, will you?’ Bridie said. ‘Bloody saint, your Pat.’

‘That will do!’ Eamonn said. ‘Haven’t we enough troubles facing us without turning on one another?’

‘I’ll make a drop of tea,’ Mary said. ‘Sure, the news is enough to make anyone a bit edgy.’

Kathy glared at her sister-in-law, but didn’t reply. She wished Maggie was in, and wondered where she’d gone, for between them they could have lightened the atmosphere that grew stiffer and stiffer as they sat together, almost in silence. Carmel was too young and her father too saddened by the news.

None of the children had spoken, and Lizzie had sidled up to Carmel. She liked to have someone at her back when Sheelagh was in the room, or in fact anywhere near her at all. Sheelagh put out her tongue as she passed and Lizzie elected not to see it, though her hands tightened into fists. If she ever hit Sheelagh again, she thought, she’d make a better job of it and really hurt her, and she reckoned it would be worth having the legs smacked off her afterwards.

Mary had just come up the cellar steps with the tray when the front door opened and the men almost fell into the room. At first Kathy thought they were drunk, but there was no smell of alcohol and she realised it was a forced gaiety, and yet she could also feel the exhilaration flowing through them all. Suddenly she knew what they’d done and understood the look that had passed between Barry and Pat earlier that day. Yet still she asked, ‘What is it?’

‘We’ve enlisted.’

‘You have, begod!’ The exclamation was torn from Eamonn. Mary stood with the tray in her hands, staring at them.

‘We wanted to be together,’ Barry exclaimed, and crossed to Kathy. ‘I’m sorry, love, we agreed between ourselves to say nothing till it was done.’

Kathy felt the tears in her eyes, but held them back. She knew they didn’t have to join up at all, being Irish citizens, but all she said was, ‘It’s probably better this way.’

‘Not Michael,’ Mary said, and she turned to her youngest son. ‘Not you?’

‘Aye, me and all, Ma.’

‘But you’re not eighteen yet, you’re too young.’ Mary’s complaint was almost a moan.

‘I’ll be eighteen in January, Ma,’ Michael said. ‘Ah, don’t cry, I had to do it.’ He crossed to his mother, took the tray from her and placed it on a table, then put his arm around her shaking shoulders.

‘We’ll look after him, Ma,’ Pat promised. ‘We’re all in the Royal Warwickshire Fusiliers and we can look out for one another.’

‘You knew what they’d do,’ Eamonn said. ‘They made no secret of it.’

‘Course they didn’t,’ Bridie snapped. ‘They couldn’t wait to get into uniform and be given guns to play with.’

‘Shut your mouth,’ Eamonn snapped, and the family was shocked into silence, but it was to Bridie he spoke. ‘You know nothing about it,’ he said, ‘and I hope you never will, but there’s no playing in war.’

Bridie said nothing. Eamonn had never spoken to her like that before and she was shaken. Perhaps she might have retaliated, but before she had a chance Pat said, ‘Someone else enlisted with us today too. He’s waiting outside.’ He opened the door and Maggie came in, leading Con Murray by the hand.

‘He enlisted, Daddy, like he said he would,’ Maggie cried. ‘Like he would have got a decent job if there had been any to be had. Now will you let us bloody well get married?’

Eamonn looked at the man before him whom he’d previously dismissed and refused even to talk to, and liked what he saw. Con’s face wasn’t exactly a handsome one, but it was open and, for all his shady dealings, looked trustworthy and honest. His eyes were clear blue and his hair was almost blond, he had a wide mouth and a determined set to his jaw, and one hand was holding Maggie’s as if it belonged there. Certainly, Eamonn thought, the fact that the lad had enlisted put a different complexion on matters. ‘Well, young man?’ he said.

Con stepped forward and grasped Eamonn’s hand. ‘I’m very pleased to meet you, sir, and I hope you will allow Maggie to become my wife.’

Mary had tears in her eyes again, and the room was so blurred she couldn’t see, but she knew from Eamonn’s voice that he was moved, as he said gruffly, ‘Well now, I see no reason why not, but it will have to be done speedily. We must remember that your time is not your own any more, so we’ll have to see about it without delay.’

Con swept Maggie into his arms and a cheer went up from the men. ‘Stupid bloody sod,’ Bridie said, but only Kathy heard; everyone else was too busy congratulating the young couple and welcoming Con to the family, while Maggie was kissing her parents and expressing her thanks.

Eventually Eamonn said, ‘I have a bottle of ten-year-old malt put away for just such an occasion, and we’ll drink a toast to the young couple and a speedy outcome to the God-awful mess the world is in.’

‘I have tea,’ Mary said.

‘Ach, tea, what good’s that, woman?’ Eamonn said. ‘Sure, this is a celebration.’

As the glasses were raised a little later, Kathy’s silent prayer was, ‘Keep them safe, God, please, bring them all home safe,’ and she caught her mother’s eye and knew her sentiments would be exactly the same.

Lizzie missed her father greatly, and the man who came home on a week’s leave in October didn’t seem like her daddy at all. He was dressed all in khaki that was rough against her legs when he pulled her against him. ‘How’s my little girl then?’ he said, and she wanted to put her arms around his neck and sob into his shoulder because she was scared that everything had changed in her young life, and yet she said nothing, knowing without being told that she shouldn’t spoil her daddy’s leave with a list of complaints.

The second day of the leave was Con and Maggie’s wedding day, which both were anxious to have finalised before Con went overseas. Lizzie was quite disappointed in the sober cream suit Maggie wore, though she had to admit it looked good on her as she walked down the aisle of St Catherine’s Church on Eamonn’s arm. She’d expected a long, flowing white dress, but her mother said there wasn’t time to go to so much trouble and anyway it wasn’t right in wartime.

It seemed the war affected everything. The local pub, The Bell, put on a spread for the few friends and family who called to wish the couple well, and the landlord Johnny McEvoy said it was the least he could do.

No one could deny Maggie’s happiness, Kathy thought; it shone out of her and affected everyone, even Mary and Eamonn, who’d have liked their girl to have had a better send-off. Con went round with a proud smile on his face and his eyes followed Maggie’s every move.

There was no time or money for a honeymoon, but the newly-weds had one night together in a hotel. After that, it was back to Mary and Eamonn’s, for all had agreed there was no point in Maggie looking for her own place until the war should be over and Con discharged. However, for the duration of the rest of his leave, Michael and Carmel lodged with Kathy so that Con and Maggie could have the attic bedroom to themselves.

Lizzie loved having Carmel share her room and wished she could do it all the time; it was like having an older sister. Carmel was thirteen now and anxious to be leaving school in the spring. ‘What will you do?’ Lizzie asked, and Carmel shrugged.

‘I’m not sure, but anything has got to be better than school, hasn’t it?’

Lizzie liked school, but answered, ‘Oh, yes.’

‘Since the war’s been declared there’s more choice,’ Carmel said.

‘Is there?’ That was the first Lizzie had heard of the war being good news for anyone.

‘You bet,’ Carmel said emphatically. ‘My friend’s sister is making munitions, that’s where the money is. She’s making a packet.’

‘Gosh.’

‘Shame you’re so young, really,’ Carmel said a little disparagingly. ‘The war will be over before you grow up.’

Lizzie remembered all the men going off to fight and thought she hoped it would, but said nothing. ‘March next year I’m off,’ Carmel went on. ‘I’ll be fourteen then.’ She sat up in the bed she was sharing with her niece and squeezed her knees tight in excitement as she said, ‘Just over four months. Ooh, I can hardly wait.’

They heard the footsteps on the stairs and quickly lay down in the bed again, thinking it was Kathy or Barry come to scold, but it was only Michael, who was also sharing the bedroom. ‘You two still awake?’ he said quietly, to avoid waking the sleeping Danny.

The two girls kept their eyes closed and pretended to be asleep, and Michael chuckled. ‘Don’t be codding on,’ he said. ‘We could hear you talking and giggling downstairs. Kathy was for coming up, she thought you’d wake Danny.’

Lizzie opened her eyes and looked at her uncle. ‘Danny never wakes,’ she said. ‘He’d sleep through an earthquake; he’s boring.’

‘Maybe he thinks bed’s the place for sleeping,’ Michael said, his voice muffled by the curtain Barry had set up for him to change behind.

‘That’s what I mean, he’s boring,’ Lizzie said.

Carmel put in, ‘You can’t expect our Michael to understand that, he’s just a man,’ and Michael’s throaty chuckle was the last thing Lizzie remembered about Maggie’s wedding day.

The five-day leave was almost over before Barry talked to Kathy about the war, not wanting to spoil their time together before. They were by themselves for once. Carmel had returned home; Sean and Pat were with their own wives and children; Con, Maggie and Michael were about their own concerns, and Barry was grateful for it. ‘I think it’s the big push for us when we go back,’ he said.

‘You mean overseas? France?’

‘I can’t be sure, but it’s odd to have a week’s leave like this, and rumours are flying about everywhere,’ Barry said.

‘It’s so soon,’ Kathy said.

‘Hitler’s hardly likely to wait around while we go through a six-month training period.’

‘I know that.’

‘And they’ve been putting us through it, I can tell you,’ Barry said.

‘You’re looking forward to it,’ Kathy said accusingly, looking at Barry’s excited face.

‘Partly,’ Barry admitted. ‘After all, it’s what I joined up for, and it’s nice we’ll be going together, wherever we end up.’

‘Pat seems a bit quiet,’ Kathy said. ‘Is he all right?’

‘That’s Bridie, I think,’ Barry said. ‘Putting him down all the time. He’s different at the barracks, life and soul. Very popular bloke.’

Something in Barry’s tone alarmed Kathy, and she asked, ‘He isn’t…you know…like, cheating on her or anything?’

Barry didn’t answer. Instead he dropped his eyes from Kathy’s and said, ‘She hasn’t let him near her for years, you know, not since she had Matt. Many a man would have insisted, a bloke can be too easy-going. Well now, if he is seeking comfort elsewhere, Bridie only has herself to blame. He’s flesh and blood same as the rest of us. Mind,’ he went on, ‘I don’t know that he is, not for certain, and I don’t ask, but there’s plenty of girls who would be only too happy to…well, you know. Like I said, he’s popular. You’d have to go a long way to find another like Pat.’

Didn’t Kathy know it; she couldn’t blame him, and God alone knew he needed a medal for putting up with Bridie. Barry was right, a man could be too easy-going; another man would have given Bridie many a clout for half the things Kathy had heard her say to Pat. She didn’t doubt what Barry had told her about Pat and Bridie’s sex life, for hadn’t Bridie said the same to her? But God, wasn’t she a stupid fool denying her husband, and it was a sin too. Many would have had the priest to see her by now, but Pat likely wouldn’t want to embarrass her like that. Suddenly she gave a huge sigh.

‘Come on,’ Barry said, pulling her to her feet. ‘Stop worrying about Pat. Worry about me for a change. I’ll be away in the morning, so I want something to remember in the weeks ahead.’

‘Oh, maybe I’ll say I’m not in the mood, like Bridie,’ Kathy said with a smile.

‘Try it, my girl, and I’ll have you across my shoulder and carry you to bed, where I’ll insist you carry out your wifely duty,’ Barry told her with mock severity. ‘I’m no Pat Sullivan.’

Lizzie heard them later, going laughing up the stairs. She was glad they were friends, but somehow it made her feel more lonely than ever. She knew her father would be gone in the morning and she hadn’t told him how she felt, and she’d not get the chance again.

With Maura Mahon and a couple of Lizzie’s other friends either evacuated with the school or sent away privately to relations and friends, Sheelagh was the only one near Lizzie’s age in the road, and so they were always being grouped together. Sheelagh never seemed to mind, and Lizzie thought she derived malicious pleasure from having someone to taunt and make fun of all the way to school in the morning and back in the evening. She’d go round in the playground with gangs whose aim in life was to harass Lizzie O’Malley. They thought her fair game, being a year younger, and singled her out mercilessly.

Lizzie, depressed and miserable, considered complaining to her mother, but she’d probably think she was making something out of nothing and say Sheelagh was just having a game, and it wasn’t as if they ever did anything.

Anyway, she knew that she couldn’t worry her mother, however bad it got; she already had enough on her plate, without Lizzie adding to it. Barry had asked Kathy to keep an eye on his own mother, Molly O’Malley. She was a widow with no daughters, and none of Barry’s three brothers were married, but all of them were overseas, so Kathy felt in some way responsible for her. She didn’t live far from the O’Malley home, just at the top end of Grant Street, and Kathy had no objections to looking out for her.

‘She’s bound to feel it,’ Barry had said. ‘Especially with us all gone,’ and she did, for Kathy said she was a bag of nerves worrying about them all and she made a point of going up to Grant Street a couple of times a week. Kathy’s father was fire-watching too, and that was another cause for concern, for Lizzie knew her grandad’s chest was terrible.

Then there was the black-out, which had to be fixed to every window before the gas could be lit and the ARP wardens parading outside to see it was done properly. Lizzie hated the black drapes at the living-room windows and the black shutters on the bedrooms. They made her feel closed in and uneasy, but her mammy said it had to be done.

And in addition to all this, October had been particularly cold and dismal, and after a warm September it was hard to take. Then November proved to be the same, with biting winds driving the sharp spears of rain bouncing on to the grey pavements. And in the cold and the rain the Royal Warwickshire Fusiliers were part of the British Expeditionary Force that headed for France.

Then December was upon them, and there was also talk of rationing being introduced just after Christmas. Kathy was worried about how they’d cope. ‘Same as everyone else, I suppose,’ Bridie said gloomily one day, and added, ‘I suppose our soldiers will be fed all right and it won’t matter if the rest of us starve.’

‘I don’t think it will come to that,’ Kathy said. ‘And at least with rationing it will be fair; rich or poor will all have the same.’

‘Huh, we’ll see.’

Kathy couldn’t make Bridie out; she never seemed happy about anything or anyone. She decided to change the subject. ‘Have you heard from Pat at all?’ she said.

‘Aye, though he never has much to say.’

‘Their letters are censored, I suppose,’ Kathy said. ‘Though Barry is usually able to drag up something to amuse the weans.’

‘He writes to the weans?’

‘Aye, he always includes a wee note, you know. They miss him so much, especially Lizzie.’

Bridie gave a snort of disgust and said, ‘If you ask me, he spoils that girl.’

‘I didn’t ask you.’

‘Well, if I can’t express an opinion…’ said Bridie, rising to her feet.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Kathy. ‘I’m all on edge, worry I suppose, and with Christmas nearly on us and hardly anything in the shops it’ll be a lean one this year, and strange without Barry.’

The conversation was cut short by the children bursting through the door, Lizzie dragging Maura Mahon after her. ‘Maura,’ said Kathy, addressing the child in surprise, ‘I thought you were away?’

‘I was, Mrs O’Malley,’ Maura replied. ‘Mammy came to fetch me home. She said there was no point in it.’

‘Your mammy told me you were staying just outside Stratford.’

‘Aye, a tiny wee place called Preston upon Stour.’

‘And did you like it?’

‘No, I didn’t, no one likes it, not even the teachers,’ Maura said vehemently. ‘It was cold and damp all the time and there was nowhere to go and nothing to do.’

‘So the country isn’t nice then?’ Lizzie asked.

‘No it ain’t, it’s blooming awful,’ Maura declared. ‘Mammy says I haven’t to go back.’

Lizzie didn’t care why or how Maura had come back; she was here and that was all that mattered. Her prayers had been answered. Life was almost back to normal again and if only her daddy was home, it would be nearly perfect.

The rationing of basic foodstuffs began on Monday 8 January that year, with every person allowed four ounces each of bacon, sugar and butter per week. Kathy knew it was only the beginning, and she wondered how she would stretch it all to last. She herself was allowed extras like orange juice, cod liver oil and vitamins, because she was pregnant again. She was glad in a way because she still pined for the baby she’d lost, but her pleasure in a new life beginning inside her was tinged with trepidation. She thought back to her last pregnancy, which had been trouble free at first. There had been no reason at all for her little son Seamus to be born so prematurely. ‘Just one of those things,’ the doctors had told her, which was no help at all. She was terrified of it happening again and this time Barry wouldn’t be there beside her either. But then it was no use worrying. Weren’t they all in God’s hand at the end of all? And yet another mouth to feed on army pay would not be easy. Barry had earned good money making guns at BSA, especially with the overtime he was almost forced to work, but now, as a serving soldier, his pay was substantially reduced and Kathy was glad she’d been prudent enough to save some of his earnings in the post office. Eamonn said it was scandalous that men fighting for their country were so undervalued, but nothing could be done.

Kathy was amazed and pleased to find that both Rose and Maggie were pregnant too, all three babies due in late July. Sharing their pregnancy pulled them closer together, but Bridie, as soon as she discovered it, would be ready with the cutting remarks Kathy knew only too well. She found out one day in late January when they were all together in Mary’s house and she overheard Kathy discussing morning sickness with Rose.

‘God in heaven!’ she exclaimed. ‘Are you on again?’

Kathy stared at her sister-in-law. Though she’d told Rose and Maggie and her parents, she’d dreaded telling Bridie. ‘Aye, aye I am,’ she said, almost defiantly.

‘Well, what kind of a bloody fool are you?’ Bridie burst out. ‘Christ, as if you haven’t enough on your plate.’

‘I’m only having a baby, for heaven’s sake, like plenty more.’

‘Aye, and there’s a war on, in case you haven’t noticed.’

‘Leave her be,’ Rose said. ‘Like Kathy said, she’s not the only one.’

‘Not you and all,’ Bridie exclaimed. ‘Mother of God, what’s the matter with the pair of you? And as for you,’ she said, addressing Rose directly, ‘what are you trying to do, populate the whole of the bleeding earth by yourself? I mean, Pete’s only three and Nuala just a baby herself.’ She shrugged and went on. ‘Well, if you want to go through life with a clutch of children hanging on to your skirt, that’s your look-out.’

‘That’s right, it’s our business,’ Maggie broke in. ‘You live your life and we’ll live ours. And you might as well know, I’m expecting as well, so what are you going to say to me?’

Bridie gave a mirthless laugh and said, ‘Well, all I’ll say is that your old man must have plenty of lead in his pencil.’

‘Bridie!’ Mary cried. ‘Less of that talk.’

But Bridie wasn’t finished. ‘Unless, of course, the wedding was rushed forward for a reason.’

‘You malicious cow!’ Maggie cried. ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Well, let me tell you, my baby is due on the thirtieth of July. Not everyone’s the same as you, you know.’

‘What d’you mean?’ Bridie snapped.

‘Well you didn’t wait till the ring was on your finger, did you?’

Bridie was white with fury. The reason for her rushed marriage had been covered up and Maggie had only been a child then, so it must have been discussed by them all since. She glared over at Kathy and Maggie cried, ‘Don’t be blaming anyone, Bridie. No one said a word to me, but I’m not stupid. I was eleven years old and well able to count to nine, but you’d only been married six months when Sheelagh appeared. Now treat me like a bloody simpleton why don’t you, and tell me she was premature?’

‘Come on now,’ Mary said, flustered by the way the whole conversation was going. ‘Let’s not have all this snapping and snarling at one another, but save our bad temper for the enemy.’

Bridie for once had nothing to say. She threw them all a look of pure hatred and flounced out of the room and slammed the door behind her.

Later, Mary said to Kathy, ‘I wonder if she’s jealous of you all. I mean, there’s been no sign since young Matt. Maybe she wants one herself and that’s what makes her so crabby at times.’

‘I think she was just born that way, Mammy,’ Kathy said. She thought over what Barry had told her before he left and went on, ‘and I don’t think she wants any more but the two she has, not really.’

A few months later, the three expectant mothers listened, horrified, to the news that Hitler had invaded France, not through the Maginot Line that the French had thought impregnable, but through Belgium. German paratroopers had blasted their way through the Belgian defences, and the road through the country lay wide open.

It soon became clear that many soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force were trapped on the shores of France, and when the news finally broke on 31 May, Operation Dynamo was revealed. Many small, privately owned boats of all shapes and sizes were pressed into service to run a shuttle service from the beaches of Dunkirk to the ships forced to lie offshore in deeper water, battling under heavy bombardment to lift as many men as possible to safety.

Kathy listened to every news report and scoured the papers, and prayed like she’d never prayed before. Her prayers were partially answered, for in early June she got a letter saying that Barry was in a military hospital on the south coast. Her relief was short-lived though, for only minutes later Bridie arrived wailing at the door, waving a telegram in her hand and crying that Pat was missing, presumed dead.

Kathy, though bitterly upset over the news about Pat, was nevertheless determined to see Barry and check he was all right. Her parents thought it was the last thing on earth she should do. ‘They’ll transfer him nearer later,’ Mary said.

‘I don’t want to wait till later. I must see him now and at least know he’s all right. Maybe he has some news of the others.’

‘Cutie, dear, think about it,’ Mary said. ‘Traipsing the country in your condition isn’t wise or sensible. God above, look what happened to wee Seamus.’

‘You’re taking a big risk, Kathy,’ Eamonn said, agreeing with his wife.

Kathy knew she was taking a big risk and her parents were justified in their concern – and she knew this headlong dash she was determined on could bring about the very thing she dreaded: a premature birth. But the urge to see Barry and reassure herself overrode her other fears. ‘I can’t just sit here fretting over him. I’ll go mad,’ she cried. ‘One way or the other, I’m going to make it to that south coast hospital as soon as is humanly possible. And what if he has news of Con, or Michael or Sean,’ she went on. ‘Don’t tell me you’re not as worried sick about them as I am?’ She looked at her parents, their faces creased and lined with anxiety and said more gently, ‘I’m going. Sensible or not, I’m going. Will you mind the weans for me?’

‘Aye, surely we will,’ Mary said. ‘You don’t have to ask, if you’re determined to go.’

‘I’m determined well enough,’ Kathy said. ‘And I’m away now to tell his mother, give her the good news that Barry is alive.’

‘Aye, poor soul,’ said Mary with feeling. ‘She’ll need something to hang on to, with the telegrams she had the other day. Lord, to hear of two sons killed in one day is hard to take.’

‘Och, woman, don’t be so daft,’ snapped Eamonn. ‘It doesn’t matter a damn when you hear it; to lose two sons would rip the heart out of you.’

The room fell silent and all had the same thought. The only one of the family they were sure about was Barry, and he was in hospital with God alone knew what injuries. Pat was missing, and of Sean, Michael or Con there was no news. They could all be casualties of this war, Kathy thought.

But Barry was alive, she told herself, and she held on to that thought. Nothing else mattered at that moment. She knew she wouldn’t rest until she saw him for herself. She needed to hold him close and tell herself that he was alive and going to stay that way.

FOUR

Long before Kathy reached her destination she was feeling hungry and exhausted. Her journey had been subject to unexplained delays and stoppages, and the carriages were full of troops. Posters demanded, Is Your Journey Really Necessary? and she thought wearily that if it wasn’t, the way her trek had gone so far, she wouldn’t have made the effort.

Kathy could never remember travelling on a train before. She knew she must have done when she left Ireland with her parents, but she’d been just a child then and she had little recollection of her life before that of the back-to-back houses of Birmingham’s inner ring.

Since then she’d never once ventured out of the city, and was totally unprepared for the clamour, noise and bustle of New Street station. The clatter of trains, slamming of doors and shrill whistles of the porters mixed with the shouts and cries of the people thronging the platform – many in khaki, Kathy noticed – made her nervous.

A train clattered to a stop behind her with a squeal of brakes and a hiss of steam that seeped along its wheels. Suddenly there was a terrifying loud shriek from a train opposite and Kathy saw billows of steam emerging from a brass funnel. She could smell soot and smoke in the air, and the place was so draughty, her teeth began to chatter.

She glanced at the large clock hung above the station platform, wondering where her train was. The clock said ten twenty, and yet the train should have left at five past. When it eventually arrived, with a deafening rumble, she was quite unnerved, but the mass of people surged forward and she was swept along in the flow.

Once inside, everyone but Kathy seemed to know what to do. She trailed up and down the corridor looking for an empty, or near-empty, compartment, but the train was cram-packed.

Eventually a young soldier, seeing her pass back along the corridor again, stepped out of a compartment and said, ‘There’s room for you in here, missus, we’ll all budge up a bit.’

Kathy knew it would have to do and sat down thankfully, but as the train hurtled south, she realised she didn’t know where she was going to get off, for all the station names had been blacked out. She found it very unnerving and worried that she wouldn’t know when they reached Plymouth.

In the event, the soldiers helped her. Despite having three brothers, she hadn’t been used to meeting strange men in such numbers, and at first she found them intimidating. However, most were kindness itself, especially when they knew the purpose of her visit. ‘I didn’t realise it was so far away or that it would take so long to get here,’ she confided to a soldier who’d told her Plymouth was the next station.

‘Every journey takes hours in this war, missus,’ the soldier said. ‘Half our lives we spend waiting.’

Kathy looked at her watch – four o’clock – and knew it was doubtful she’d get home that night. She remembered Lizzie’s anxious face pressed to the window pane, watching her walk away. She’d wanted to come and see her daddy, and any other time Kathy might have taken her, but she knew wartime was not the time to haul children about the country, so she’d explained that Lizzie had to be very adult and grown-up and not make a fuss about things. The child was disappointed, but she said not a word and instead sat with a set, worried face waiting for her mother to return and tell her how her daddy was. The stoicism of it tore at Kathy’s heart.

‘Have you any more children?’ the soldier asked. ‘I can see you’re expecting, like my own wife back home.’

‘I have two,’ Kathy said. ‘A boy and a girl. Lizzie is nearly nine and Danny is six, and this one,’ Kathy said, indicating her stomach, ‘is due in July.’

‘It’s our first, Brenda’s and mine,’ the soldier said. ‘Due any day – can’t help wondering and hoping that she’ll be all right, you know?’

‘I’m sure she will,’ Kathy assured him. ‘After all, women have been doing it for years.’

‘Yes, I know, it’s just not being there with her…I worry a bit.’

‘I bet she worries more about you,’ Kathy said with feeling. ‘Barry was hardly ever out of my thoughts for long, and when I heard he’d been injured, my heart stopped beating for a minute or two.’

‘You don’t know how bad it is?’

‘No, they didn’t say.’

‘Well, if they’ve transferred him, he can’t be that bad.’

‘You think so?’ Kathy grasped the lifeline hopefully.

‘It’s what they say.’

At that moment the train gave a sudden lurch and the soldier turned to Kathy and said, ‘We’re coming in to Plymouth now. Wait for the crush to pass and I’ll get you a taxi.’

‘Oh, I don’t think…’

‘You’ll never find it on your own.’ And Kathy knew he was right and just nodded.

‘Have you a bag?’ he asked, looking around the compartment.

‘Only my handbag,’ Kathy said.

‘But you’ll not get back tonight,’ the soldier said. ‘Have you a place to stay?’

‘No, no, I never thought.’

‘You’d be welcome at the barracks,’ the soldier said with a smile. ‘Well, at least the men would welcome you, but the sergeant might have something to say.’

Kathy smiled. ‘I think I’ll pass on that,’ she said.

‘Maybe the taxi driver knows of somewhere. I should check it out before you get to the hospital.’

Kathy thanked him, but once in the taxi she knew she had to see Barry right away. The problem of where she was to spend the night could wait. She’d passed through the countryside in the train without really taking it in, but in the taxi she was surprised by the sea, calm and sparkling in the mid-June afternoon. There were many couples strolling arm-in-arm as if they hadn’t a care in the world, and yet the men, almost without exception, were in uniform, and Kathy knew the reality was quite different.

She lost no time when the taxi stopped outside the hospital, but hurried inside to find someone who could tell her where Barry was and when she could see him. Shortly after she entered the building she was confronted by a nurse whose name tag identified her as Sister Hopkins. ‘Mrs O’Malley?’ she said, when Kathy had introduced herself.

‘Yes, I’m Barry’s wife,’ Kathy said, nervous before the stern-faced woman and almost frightened now she’d got this far. ‘Can, can I see him?’

‘Well, it’s most irregular.’

‘Oh, please,’ Kathy said. ‘I’ve come all the way from Birmingham. My family are desperate for news of him and I’ve left behind two very worried weans.’

Sister Hopkins stared at the woman in front of her. She was startling to look at, with her raven-black hair and deep-brown eyes, but her face was pasty white and there were black rings circling the eyes. She was far advanced in pregnancy and yet had come halfway across the country to see her man. ‘Maybe you can see him for a little while,’ she said.

‘Is…is he badly injured?’

‘No, not really,’ the nurse said. ‘He has shrapnel wounds to his head and abdomen and his left arm is badly lacerated – we thought at one point he might lose it, but the doctor has managed to save it, at least so far. We have to keep an eye on it in case of infection, and of course only time will tell if he’ll ever regain full use of it.’ She looked at Kathy’s startled face and said, ‘Believe me, Mrs O’Malley, your husband was one of the lucky ones.’

Kathy stared open-mouthed, amazed that someone could talk with so little emotion of removing a limb. Sister Hopkins caught her look and said, ‘You should see some of the poor beggars lifted from the beaches of Dunkirk.’

Not to mention those left behind. Neither woman said it, but both thought it.

Barry lay staring at the ceiling, a bandage swathed about his head and his face as white as the pillow he lay on. Kathy said nothing till she stood beside the bed and then she whispered, ‘Barry.’

He turned his head, and though Kathy could tell that he was pleased to see her, his enthusiasm was slightly forced. There was something lurking behind his eyes. ‘Kath!’ he cried. ‘God, when did you…how did you?’

‘We were informed you were here,’ Kathy said. ‘I had to come and see you, the weans were asking for you.’ She spread her empty hands and said, ‘I couldn’t stop to buy anything, not indeed that there’s much in the shops.’

‘No, no, it’s all right,’ Barry quickly reassured her. ‘To see you is enough.’ He passed his unbandaged hand across his eyes and said, ‘You’ve heard about Pat, I suppose?’

‘Just before I left, yes,’ Kathy said. ‘“Missing presumed dead”, the telegram said.’

‘Oh, he’s dead all right,’ Barry said, almost harshly, and then, catching sight of Kathy’s stricken face, went on, ‘I’m sorry, that was bloody clumsy.’ He took Kathy’s hand and said, ‘I know you loved him, and I did too, funny that coming from a bloke, but he was the best mate I ever had. I’d known him from the day we started school together and that was that really, it was always us together against the world. I met you through knowing your Pat, and even after our marriages we were mates. God!’ he cried. ‘What a bloody waste.’

‘What happened?’ Kathy said. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’

‘Oh, aye, I’ll talk about it. Like lambs to the bleeding slaughter we were,’ Barry said bitterly. ‘It was bedlam, the Jerries advancing and we had orders to retreat to the beaches. We got separated from our company, Pat and I, as he copped it early on.’

‘Copped it?’

‘Bullets,’ Barry said. ‘One shattered his knee and the other was in his chest. By the time I’d strapped him up and turned round, the rest had gone on and it was just the two of us. We met up with others on the way, stragglers like us who’d got separated from their units for one reason or another. I half carried Pat to the beach where I thought we might have a chance, not much of a bloody chance, but the only chance we had.

‘There was constant bombing and the Stukas screaming above us, raining down bullets. It was hell on earth, Kath,’ Barry said. ‘The bombs fell that thick and fast, you couldn’t think straight with the noise of them and the screaming and yelling all around. You’d see men fall into the craters from a bomb directly in front of you and then the next blast would cover them up. It was a massacre. I could see some blokes had pushed jeeps into the sea to make a sort of jetty. The destroyers were way out, not able to come in any nearer, and there were all these boats, not military things, yachts, cruisers. Kath, you’ve never seen anything like it.’

‘We heard on the news and read about it,’ Kathy said.

‘Aye, but nothing could describe the sight of those little pleasure cruisers shuttling between the jetty and the larger ships put out in deeper water,’ Barry said. ‘They were under constant fire and yet they just carried on as if they were on a pleasure trip. It was a bloody miracle. Me and Pat were starving hungry, thick with mud and dog tired, soaked to the skin and shaking with cold, but these little boats brought a smile even to my lips.

‘But I could see Pat was sinking fast and the blood was seeping through the bandaging I’d put on. Then people who’d stood on the jetty for hours for rescue, just as tired, scared and miserable as us, made way for Pat, seeing that he was injured. I put him into a dinghy that came alongside,’ Barry went on. ‘He wanted me along with him, but it was wounded first. Not yet, I said, I’ll see you later in good old Blighty.

‘“Hold you to it, mate,” Pat said, “we’ll have a pint together.”

‘I watched him sail away and saw them haul him onto the destroyer. I remember thinking how that must have hurt him, but now at least he had a chance; they’d have medical people on board and maybe he could get out of his wet things, and they’d certainly be able to find him something to eat. I wanted to cheer. And then I saw the Messerschmitts, flying in low. I started to scream, stupid really, but I wasn’t the only one. When the first bombs fell, I jumped in the water. Didn’t know really what I was hoping to do. There I was, thrashing about and getting nowhere. Then the grey foamy water closed over my head and I thought this is it, and then I felt hands clawing at me. Two blokes had lain full stretch across the jeeps to reach me, with others holding their legs to stop them toppling in. They were yelling, “Grab on, mate, Grab on,” and d’you know, Kath, I nearly didn’t bother, and then I thought of you and the weans and I reached out for their hands. God, it seemed to take hours. I was tired and so was every other bugger and I was weighed down by my clothes. People reached out and caught my tunic and pulled me up on to the jetty. I lay for a minute getting my breath back and spluttering and coughing. By the time I was able to look up again the ship was gone, blown to kingdom come and nothing to show for it but a few dead bodies and debris littering the water.

‘I was so stunned, I wasn’t ready for the Stukas that seemed to come from nowhere. That’s how I copped for all this,’ said Barry, touching the bandage on his head. ‘And they got my belly and nearly sheared my arm clean off. And you know the other sad thing, Kath? The two blokes that pulled me out of the water and were so concerned with me, they didn’t take cover themselves and both were killed beside me.’

‘Oh, Barry.’ Tears were raining down Kathy’s face and, she realised with shock, down her husband’s too.

‘You know what tortures me?’ Barry said brokenly. ‘I keep thinking that if we’d stayed where we were when Pat was first hit, the Germans would have picked us up. They’d have seen to Pat’s leg and chest and he’d be bloody alive by now, even if he was a prisoner.’

Kathy shook her head. ‘He couldn’t stand being locked up,’ she said, and then added, ‘I don’t suppose there was a chance Pat might have made it? I mean, he couldn’t have been in the water and been picked up by a boat somewhere?’

Barry shook his head. ‘Not a chance,’ he said. ‘He wasn’t only tired and starving like the rest of us, but badly wounded too, and very weak. He’d never have survived. They did look; two or three boats diverted and cruised around for a bit when the ship went down. Like I said, it was just dead bodies. I was out of it by then, with my arm near hanging off, and bleeding from my head and guts. I was on the next boat out, not that I knew much about it. Most of the time I was raving. We put in at Dover where they patched me up and sent me here as a non-urgent case. They were run off their feet down there, and you should have seen the poor buggers…’ Barry stopped and wiped at his eyes before saying, ‘Kath, Pat was the greatest mate I ever had, or am likely to have. There’ll never be another like him, but he’s gone and we’ve all got to accept it.’

Kathy wiped her own face with a small handkerchief she drew from her bag, then said, ‘What about Michael and the others?’

‘They were all alive when last I saw them,’ Barry said. ‘That’s all I know. The beaches were chaos, there was no chance of seeing anyone there.’

‘You really must leave now, Mrs O’Malley,’ said Sister Hopkins’ voice at Kathy’s elbow. Neither of them had heard her approach in her soft-soled shoes.

‘Not yet,’ protested Barry.

‘I’m sorry, Mr O’Malley, but your wife has been here some time and she shouldn’t really have got in at all.’

‘When will you come again?’ Barry cried.

‘Maybe tomorrow,’ Kathy said, eyeing the nurse. ‘I’ll not get back to Birmingham today with trains the way they are. I’ll look for somewhere to stay for tonight and, if Sister agrees, come and see you tomorrow before I go back.’

‘It’s most irregular, Mrs O’Malley,’ Sister Hopkins said again.

‘I know, but it will have to last Barry a long time,’ Kathy said.

‘And it will help me get better, Sister, honest,’ Barry put in. ‘Then I’ll be out of your hair altogether.’

Sister Hopkins pursed her lips and said to Kathy as she bent to kiss Barry goodbye, ‘You’ll have to work it out with the times of your trains, but the doctors are usually finished by ten o’clock.’

Just as Kathy was about to answer, the man in the next bed shouted, ‘Good on you, Sister. He’s a bleeding hero, Barry. Got to look after us heroes, they’ll need us all before this lot’s over.’

Kathy glanced at him. She saw there were seven other men besides Barry in the ward, but on her way in she hadn’t noticed any of them. She’d had eyes only for her husband. She saw all the men watching her now with interest. Sister Hopkins glanced sternly at the man who had spoken and said, ‘Really, Mr Stoddard, we look after everyone well here.’

Mr Stoddard looked not a bit abashed and instead winked at Kathy. She found herself smiling back at him. ‘Good-bye,’ she said, and there was a chorus of farewells from the other beds.

She stopped at the door to wave to Barry and the other men and hurried after Sister Hopkins. ‘Is there a café locally?’ Kathy asked the nurse, when they were out of earshot of the ward.

‘I believe you need a place to stay too,’ Sister Hopkins said. ‘I did hear you say that, didn’t I?’

‘Oh, aye, do you know of one?’ Kathy asked eagerly.

‘Mrs O’Malley, the town is heaving with soldiers. I think it would be very difficult to find a place tonight.’

‘Oh, I see.’

‘And if you don’t mind me saying so, you look all in.’

‘I am rather tired. It’s the emotion and everything.’

‘I suggest, then, that you come home with me tonight.’

‘Oh, I couldn’t…’

‘You can hardly sleep on a park bench, my dear,’ Sister Hopkins said with a smile, and Kathy realised that behind the frosty exterior was a very kind woman. ‘I’m sure my sofa will be quite comfortable,’ she went on. ‘And though there are many cafés around, the nurse’s canteen is cheaper and I can take you in as a guest. I’m off duty at six, if you could just wait a while.’

‘Oh, aye, oh, thank you,’ Kathy cried.

The nurse went on: ‘There’s a reception area where you could sit. I’ll show you. Oh, and by the way, when we are away from the hospital, my name is Peggy.’

Oh, thought Kathy, how kind people were, and if only she could get over this feeling of sadness at the death of her beloved brother…She’d sort of faced it before she’d left home, but when he was said to be missing she’d felt there was always a chance that he’d be found. Now that chance was gone. She knew she’d never see Pat again, and that hurt. The way Barry had described the hell-hole of Dunkirk, it was amazing that anyone had got out of it alive, but Barry had, and she must latch on to that and hope that with God’s help, Sean, Michael and Con were all safe too.

She was surprised how much better she felt with a meal inside her, and while she ate she found herself telling Sister Hopkins about all her family. ‘They’ll be worried,’ she said. ‘Mammy and Daddy especially, and my little girl Lizzie.’

‘Can you phone?’

Kathy looked at the nurse in amazement. ‘We haven’t a phone,’ she said.

Sister Hopkins realised she’d made an error. ‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘Has anyone else, a shop perhaps?’

‘Pickering’s have, I believe,’ Kathy said.

‘Are they far away?’

‘No, not far, and they’d pass on a message.’

‘Well then, there’s a phone in the hospital,’ Sister Hopkins said. ‘You can tell them you’re safe at least, and will be home tomorrow.’

‘I…I don’t know how to use a phone. I’ve never had to,’ Kathy confessed.

‘That’s all right. I’ll show you,’ said the nurse.

A short time later, Kathy found herself talking to Mrs Pickering, who owned the shop just up from the O’Malleys’. She shouted a bit, unable to believe that sound could travel from one instrument to another so effectively unless she bawled her head off, and though Mrs Pickering might have been rendered deaf in one ear for a time, she reassured Kathy and promised to pass the news on to her parents. Then Kathy went home with Peggy Hopkins and spent a very comfortable night on her sofa.

It was over breakfast that Kathy faced up to the fact that she hadn’t told Barry about the deaths of his brothers. There hadn’t been time the previous day, and anyway she’d hesitated to load him down with more sadness. She hoped he was feeling stronger this morning, for she’d have to talk to him.

When Kathy walked into the ward, the men greeted her as if they’d known her forever. ‘You did them a power of good yesterday, Mrs O’Malley,’ a young nurse told Kathy as she passed. ‘They all spruced themselves up this morning when they heard you were coming back. Some who hadn’t had a shave for a week were asking for razors this morning.’

Kathy laughed and said, ‘If they’d do that for someone my shape, they’d be standing on their heads for some of the young lasses in the town.’

‘They would that, and it’s a sight I wouldn’t like to miss.’

But the young nurse was right. Barry was propped up, looking far more cheerful, with his hair brushed and the stubble gone from his cheeks and chin. Kathy was delighted to see him looking so well and was pleased he seemed to be coming to terms with Pat’s death and accepting it for the tragic accident it was. She dredged up little incidents about the family, things she couldn’t remember writing in her letters, and funny things the weans had said, trying desperately to amuse him.

But Barry was no fool. He knew Kathy was holding something back and he only waited till she stopped to draw breath before saying, ‘What is it?’

Kathy was taken aback. ‘What’s what? Nothing. What do you mean?’ she stammered, confused.

Barry studied her, more sure than ever that she was hiding something. ‘How’s Ma?’ he said.

‘Great, so she is, great,’ Kathy said. ‘I go up a couple of times a week and she comes down sometimes…’ Her voice trailed away as she remembered the last time she’d seen Molly O’Malley, and at once Barry knew there was something wrong at home.

‘What is it, Kathy?’ he said. ‘I know something is bothering you, and if you don’t tell me, I’ll only worry when you’ve gone.’

He put out his good hand but Kathy pulled away and said, almost angrily, ‘Nothing I tell you. Your ma’s fine.’

‘My brothers then? Something’s damn well wrong,’ Barry burst out.

Kathy couldn’t prevent the shadow from passing over her face and Barry just asked, ‘Who?’

Kathy’s voice was barely above a whisper as she answered, ‘Phil and Donal.’

‘The two of them, dear Christ,’ Barry moaned, and after a slight pause asked, ‘Are they both…dead?’

Kathy just nodded, and Barry shut his eyes against the pain of it. Suddenly his hand shot out and grabbed Kathy’s. ‘Kath, I want you out of that place.’

‘What place?’

‘Birmingham.’

‘Don’t be daft, Barry.’

‘I’m not being daft. Pregnant women can be evacuated, with their children.’

‘I can’t just run away, Barry. What about your ma – she’s got to rely on me a lot now – and Bridie and Mammy and Daddy coming to terms with the loss of Pat? And what if Michael, Sean or Con are gone too, that will break Mammy’s heart altogether, not to mention Maggie and Rose. I can’t just go somewhere safe and pretend they’re nothing to me.’

Barry considered this and knew she had a point. ‘Well, the children then,’ he said.

Kathy made an impatient movement on the bed. ‘We’ve discussed this already,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t keen on the weans going to strangers and you agreed with me.’

‘Yes,’ Barry said, ‘I did, but…look, everyone knows Hitler is working towards invasion. However you look at it, Dunkirk was a defeat, and he’ll think we’re crushed and now is the time to attack the cities. Then, when we’re demoralised and depressed, as he thinks, he’ll invade.’

‘How d’you know all this?’

‘It stands to reason, Kath,’ Barry said.

‘But why Birmingham?’

‘Oh, use your loaf,’ Barry cried impatiently. ‘Birmingham is crucial to the war effort and is bound to be targeted.’

Kathy thought a little and knew that Barry had a point. Everyone was aware of Birmingham’s contribution to the war effort. There was the Vickers factory which made Spitfires then pushed them across the road to Castle Bromwich aerodrome to be flown south; and the BSA factory turning out military motorbikes and guns. Even Cadbury’s had drastically cut their production of chocolate, and much of the workforce was packing cordite into rockets, while Dunlop made most of the tyres for the planes and military vehicles, and the car factories were busy making tanks.

‘Hitler will want to flatten Birmingham,’ Barry said. ‘You must see that.’

‘I can see he’d want to, but we’re two hundred miles from the coast.’

‘And what d’you think that is in a plane?’ Barry demanded angrily.

‘We’ve got the cellar, we’ll be all right.’

‘Oh, fine,’ Barry said sarcastically. ‘That’s all right then. And who’s to see to our weans when you have the baby? Rose or Maggie, who’ll have their own hands full, or your ma, who’ll be run off her feet looking after you all? And what about when the weans are at school?’ Barry went on. ‘Or out playing in the streets somewhere, or down the park? Can you protect them then?’

‘I won’t send my weans to strangers,’ Kathy said stubbornly.

Barry sighed in exasperation and said, ‘Look, Kathy, the chap in the last bed goes by the name of Barraclough – Chris Barraclough. They’re monied people, or were, but their father died some years ago. There’s just Chris and a younger brother, David – he’s away at school – and the mother wants to do her bit and open her home up to people from the cities who may need to escape for a while. She had evacuees before, in nineteen thirty-nine, but they went back when no bombs fell.’

‘Very nice of her, I’m sure,’ Kathy put in sarcastically. ‘But to me, they’re still strangers.’

‘Talk to Chris, he can put it better than me.’

To humour Barry, Kathy went to find Chris Barraclough. He was due to be discharged in a day or so and was sitting in a wheelchair with a rug over his knees, reading the paper. Kathy was surprised at how young he was. He had an open, honest kind of face, one you could trust somehow. He was a handsome boy too, with regular features, a full mouth, a firm chin and deep-blue eyes with dark lashes. His hair, regulation short, was blond, but the Brylcreem made it look darker. At Kathy’s approach he put aside his paper and gave her such a beautiful smile, her heart flipped in surprise.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I don’t need to ask who you are. Barry has a photograph of you; he’s shown it to everyone in the ward, I think. I feel as if I know you already, and may I say, Mrs O’Malley, the photograph does not do you justice.’

Kathy flushed, not used to gallantry and unable to deal with it. ‘Mr…Mr Barraclough,’ she stammered.

‘Oh, Chris, please,’ the young man said. ‘And may I call you Kathy?’

Kathy gave a shrug and a smile. ‘Everyone else does,’ she said.

‘Well then, so will I.’ He regarded the woman in front of him and thought her very beautiful, and Barry a lucky chap. Her pregnancy had lent a bloom to her skin, and her eyes were so large and dark brown you felt you could drown in them. It seemed criminal to him that war would be waged on such as the woman before him in all the industrial cities of Britain; judging by the atrocities in Poland, none were too young, old or infirm to experience Nazi brutality.

‘My mother has a house in a small village in Herefordshire,’ he began, when Kathy explained what she’d come to see him about. ‘It’s a rambling old place, far too big for Mother now she’s on her own, but she loves it. You would love it too, I know, even if only for a week or two. It has rolling hillsides dotted with sheep, forest land and the River Wye and its tributaries. It truly is idyllic, and once you’re there, you’ll forget there’s a war being waged anywhere.’ He smiled and went on. ‘I’m off myself soon for a week of pampering and spoiling from my dear mother before I report for active service again.’

‘And what makes you think your mother would welcome my weans?’ Kathy asked quite sharply.

‘She likes children,’ Chris said disarmingly. ‘Apparently she wanted a houseful, but my father was an officer in the Great War and was badly injured internally and externally. Over the years the old wounds gave him much trouble – in fact, I can never remember him as a fit, well man; he always seemed to be an invalid. He died when my young brother David was a year old.’

‘How old is your brother now?’

‘Thirteen,’ Chris said. ‘And I’m twenty. I went from boarding school to the army. Mother was a bit upset, she thought I’d go to university first – keep me safe, as it were – but I didn’t want to skulk at home, you know. Now she’s worried for David, who is keeping his fingers crossed that the war won’t be over before he’s through school.’

‘You say your mother wanted lots of children,’ Kathy said, ‘but both you and your brother went away to school. What can she know about having children around her all day?’

‘We didn’t go away till we were turned eleven,’ Chris explained. ‘David has only been boarding for just over two years, and unfortunately that coincided more or less with me joining up. Mother is so lonely now, though she seldom complains. All her life she’s longed for a daughter; she’d love yours.’

‘Maybe,’ Kathy said. ‘But I don’t like my children going to people I don’t know, however kind and well-off they are.’

‘Oh, but you will go with them, surely?’

‘No, I’ve explained to Barry,’ Kathy said. ‘There’s no way I can go.’

‘Then send your children before the bombs come,’ Chris pleaded. ‘I can vouch for their happiness there.’

‘No one can do that, Mr Barraclough,’ Kathy said, but she accepted the address that he scribbled down, and promised to think about it.

FIVE

Back home, the place was in uproar, and Kathy was delighted to hear that Sean, Michael and Con had been in touch. They were all safe and sound and would be home for a week’s leave as soon as they were allowed, but it was nearly ten days before they arrived. It was wonderful to have them back and they were all interested in hearing about Barry, but terribly upset about Pat being missing. Not wishing to depress them still further, Kathy kept from them Barry’s revelations about what had really happened to Pat and confided only in Mary. ‘Shall I tell Bridie, Mammy?’ she asked. ‘Do you think it will help her to know the truth?’

Mary shook her head. ‘It would serve no purpose,’ she said at last. ‘She’s coming to terms with it in her own way, leave it so.’

The men were amazed that so many had escaped the beaches, and said so. ‘We were badly equipped,’ Sean complained. ‘One bloody tin hat, rifle and bayonet was all we had to combat the German panzer division. Bloody ridiculous it was.’

‘And then we had the order to retreat to the beaches,’ Con put in. ‘And that was just madness too. No one knew what was what, or where to go, or any damn thing.’

‘That had us by the balls right enough,’ Michael said.

‘Michael,’ warned Mary automatically. Sean and Con were convulsed with laughter, and even Eamonn had a twinkle in his eye. Mary rounded on them all. ‘You’re no help, any of youse.’

‘Ma,’ said Sean, wiping his eyes, ‘don’t be giving out. Michael’s a man now and he’s earned the right to say what he likes.’

‘Begorra he has,’ Mary said, but she knew Sean was right. The adolescent Michael who’d joined up in a fever of patriotism had shed his youth’s skin and had stepped over into the man’s world. Sean had also changed, and Mary supposed that the experiences they’d lived through would have affected anyone. He also seemed very worried about Rose, as her pregnancy seemed to be taking it out of her. He knew she had a lot to do with the little ones.

‘I don’t think she’s that strong,’ Mary confided one day to Kathy. ‘And she’s so thin, you’d hardly know she was pregnant.’

It was true. While Kathy and Maggie had ballooned out and had little to fit them, Rose had seemed not to change shape much at all. She tried to put on a brave face for Sean, but the lines of strain were visible to everyone and Sean was not fooled. ‘I’m not wishing anything against Sean, mind,’ Mary said one day to Kathy, ‘but it would help if he was sent overseas for a wee while, give her time to get over this one before he’s at her again.’

‘Mammy!’

‘Well, I’m only saying what I’m thinking, and it doesn’t have to go any further.’

‘Well, I shan’t say anything, and I do feel sorry for Rose,’ Kathy said. ‘I’m also glad Maggie gave up at the factory at the beginning of Con’s leave. I was beginning to think she’d have her baby on the factory floor.’ She looked at her mother and said, ‘Daddy seems all right with Con now.’

‘Oh, sure, that’s your father. He thinks him a fine fellow of a man now, so he does. Sure, it’s Carmel we have the problems with these days.’

Kathy knew a little about that. Carmel was turned fourteen now and was working in Cadbury’s. She loved her workmates and her new-found freedom, and the money she’d never had before, and she had become pert and cheeky in Mary’s opinion. ‘You should see how she dresses up to go to the cinema or dancing with the other girls; the skirts are positively indecent,’ Mary said.

‘You know the government have said skirts must be above the knee now,’ Kathy reminded her, but with a smile.

Mary sniffed. ‘There’s above the knee and there’s well above the knee, and don’t think it’s patriotism that decides Carmel’s skirt length. They chop and change with their friends to have different outfits. I told her there will be clothes rationing soon and I don’t know what she’ll do then.’

‘What did she say?’

‘She said she’d worry about it when it happens.’

‘She’s right in a way, Mammy. I mean, why worry before you have to?’

‘You don’t see her plastered to the eyeballs with make-up, with gravy browning on her legs to make them look like stockings, and trotting off on high heels.’

‘Where does she find to go?’

‘Cinema, she says, or dancing. I’m sure she’s meeting boys. Your da would go mad if he thought that.’

‘You can’t stop her, Mammy, they’re probably all the same, you know, just having fun.’

‘She says they are, and the other mothers aren’t always giving out to them,’ Mary said wearily, and gave a sigh. ‘She often sneaks away when I go round to Rose’s to give her a hand with the weans. Eamonn caught her smoking a cigarette the other day and she wasn’t even ashamed. She said they all did on the line and what was the harm. She had a packet of ten Woodbines half gone and she had the nerve to offer her dad one.’

Kathy had to laugh at the sheer cheek of it. ‘Did he take it?’ she asked, and Mary pushed at her and shook her head as she said, ‘You’re as much help as our Maggie. She tells me to stop giving out or I’ll make her worse, but God, Kathy, the place is full of soldiers. What if she has a lad?’

‘What if she has?’

‘You know your da and you can say that?’ Mary said. ‘Dear God, if he caught her arm-in-arm with some soldier out for all he could get, he’d take his belt off to her.’

‘Mammy, she has to sometime,’ Kathy said. ‘She’s not a little girl any more. She’s mixing with older women, it’s bound to have an effect, but in the long run it will do no harm.’

‘You don’t think she’ll get herself into trouble?’

‘Why should she?’ Kathy said, and pushed away the revelations Maggie had made about sleeping with Con before they were married. They’d been older than Carmel and wanted to marry; this was entirely different. ‘She’ll be all right, Mammy,’ she told Mary confidently. ‘She’s a good girl and she knows right from wrong.’

‘Humph,’ said Mary, ‘I just hope you’re right,’ and Kathy hoped she was too.

It was almost the end of the men’s week’s leave and Lizzie’s birthday had been and gone days before, but her very best present of all was hearing that her dad had been transferred to the General Hospital in Birmingham. Her mam had been to see him often, but alone, because children weren’t usually allowed in the wards. But Mammy had worked something of a miracle with the nursing staff, because they allowed Lizzie to visit her daddy once in the hospital, together with her mammy and her uncles.

The rules said only two visitors to a bed, but the Sullivan clan disregarded the rule, as no one was about to enforce it, and clustered around the bed. Con, Sean and Michael ribbed Barry, mercilessly.

‘Nothing much wrong with him that I can see,’ Sean said.

‘Not a thing,’ agreed Con.

‘Amazing what a man will do to get out of fighting,’ Michael put in.

‘Be quiet, you lot,’ Kathy said, though she was glad to see Barry cheered up. He needed something to take his mind off the terrible events in Dunkirk. ‘Shut up now or we’ll be thrown out.’

Soon they were anyway, for the nurse came back and hustled the three men out into the corridor, and then there was just Lizzie and Kathy beside Barry’s bed, and Lizzie’s eyes were shining in her head.

‘Have you a kiss for your daddy now you’re a big girl of nine years old?’ Barry asked.

‘Daddy!’ Lizzie cried, and threw her arms around her father’s neck.

‘Here, here, you’re not crying, are you?’

‘No,’ Lizzie said untruthfully, scrubbing at her eyes.

‘I should think not,’ Barry said in mock severity, and then his voice dropped and with a sad expression on his face he said, ‘I’m afraid I couldn’t get out to get you a present.’

‘I don’t care, Daddy. I just want you better.’

‘Mind you,’ Barry said with a wink at Kathy, who was in on the joke, ‘I might have some old thing lying around.’

‘It doesn’t matter, Daddy.’

‘No, no, let me see now,’ Barry said, and reaching over to his locker he withdrew a rag doll so beautiful that Lizzie’s eyes nearly popped out. She had golden plaits sewn to the top of her head, her eyes were the most brilliant blue and her mouth was rosy red, with two crimson cheeks as well. She wore a dress of plum velvet trimmed with lace at the cuffs and the hem, which nearly reached the top of her soft black leather boots.

‘Oh, Daddy, oh, she’s beautiful, thank you, thank you.’

‘It’s OK, princess, cheap at the price,’ Barry said, winking at Kathy again. ‘Three packets of fags and half a pound of bull’s-eyes.’

Kathy had been told about the present in a letter Barry had sent her just after her visit to Plymouth, in which he explained about the dolls made by a relative of Sister Hopkins. ‘Where does she get the clothes from, and the material?’ Kathy asked, fingering the plush velvet.

‘Odds and ends, I think,’ Barry said. ‘I know she buys very little, and she sends the fags and sweets overseas to men who have no doting wives to make their lives more bearable.’

‘Some odds and ends,’ said Kathy incredulously. ‘She must have rich connections.’

‘Anyway, it’s for you now, Lizzie,’ Barry said. ‘Something to remember your daddy by when you go off to the country.’

Lizzie stared at her father, not sure if she’d heard right. She remembered the children going to the country nine months ago, and nothing had happened. No bombs had fallen, and all the children who’d been evacuated had come back. Most of them had been glad to return. Lizzie didn’t want to go to any country, it sounded awful. Maura had said as much.

Beside her, she knew her mother was angry, bristling with it. She saw her open her mouth to speak, but Barry forestalled her by adding, ‘Surely your mammy has told you about it?’

Before Lizzie had time to speak, Kathy burst out, ‘Stop it, Barry, you have no right.’

‘No right,’ Barry exploded. ‘She’s my bloody child too, her and Danny, and I want them safe. Is that so wrong? I think I have a perfect right.’

‘Not to spring it on us, on Lizzie, like this.’

‘You told Chris Barraclough?’

‘I told him I’d think about it.’

‘Well?’

‘I’m still thinking about it.’

‘Well, I hope you’re still able to think when you’re buried under a landmine,’ Barry snapped.

‘Barry!’ Kathy was shocked, and Barry, catching sight of the faces of his wife and daughter, was ashamed of his outburst. ‘You’re upsetting the child,’ Kathy said, and Barry could not deny it, because tears were squeezing out of Lizzie’s eyes and dribbling down her cheeks. But she wasn’t upset about what her daddy had said about bombs; it was her mammy and daddy arguing that she didn’t like.

‘I’m sorry,’ Barry said. ‘Don’t mind me, Lizzie. I get fed up waiting around for my head and stomach to heal, so I can get out of here.’

Kathy, glad to change the subject, said, ‘Have they given you any idea?’

‘Next couple of days they said last time I asked,’ Barry said. ‘I’ll have to go back in for physio on the arm, but I’ll be home for a while.’

‘That’s wonderful,’ Kathy said. ‘It would be great, so it would.’

‘Then I’ll have to see what I can do,’ Barry said with a smile. ‘Now, about that other business…’

‘Leave it till you get home,’ Kathy said. ‘Then we’ll talk, promise.’ She kissed him on the cheek and added, ‘We’d better be on our way and let the other hooligans in before they wreck the hospital.’

Barry knew she was anxious to get away and was sorry he’d soured Lizzie’s visit, but he said nothing. He’d be home soon, and then he’d make Kathy see sense.

On 22 June, France finally surrendered. The so-called impregnable Maginot Line had provided little opposition to the seemingly unstoppable German army. People were only too well aware that just a small stretch of water separated Britain from the Nazi-dominated Europe. Defeat seemed probable, invasion imminent. The government realised the seriousness of the situation and mustered the Home Guard, and an information sheet went out to all householders entitled ‘If the Invader Comes’. People were encouraged to disable cars not in use, and hide maps and so on to confuse enemy spies, who many were sure were behind every lamp post.

Barry was due home the next day, and he was still there two days later when the first bombs fell in West Bromwich. ‘You see,’ he cried to Kathy as they clustered around the wireless. ‘That will happen here.’

‘No,’ Kathy snapped back. ‘It might not, but what will happen is invasion, everyone says so, and if we’re going to be invaded, my children stay here with me.’

Barry slammed out of the house angrily. There was no budging Kathy. He’d been working on her ever since he came out of the hospital, but she wouldn’t agree to the children being evacuated. He might have stood a chance if the children had been for it, but they weren’t. Lizzie, in particular, was dead against going anywhere in the country.

Barry was an impatient man anyway; his arm wasn’t healing as quickly as he’d hoped and he was missing his mates. Only the other day, Kathy, hurt by his attitude, had cried, ‘You can’t wait to get back, can you?’

And he’d replied, ‘No, I can’t, out of the bleeding road. You live your life quite well without me.’

The point was, Kathy had lived her life without Barry because she’d had to do it, and she had responsibilities to the family she couldn’t just drop. Much worse for Barry was Bridie, who never seemed to be away from the house for five minutes, and who went on and on about Pat and how she missed him, as if Barry didn’t feel bad enough already. He was uncomfortably aware that had he and Pat stayed where they were and surrendered, they might both have survived. As it was, he was alive and Pat wasn’t, and even the fact that Con had told him he’d heard the SS had taken few prisoners but gunned down many who’d surrendered only made him feel moderately better – and guilt made him lash out, even at the children.

Also, Kathy was easily tired and heavily pregnant, and though she lay beside him in bed every night, he could hardly take her in his arms and love her as he wanted – he wasn’t that selfish. But God, it didn’t help his frustration. He knew that Kathy was worried he would want to make love, so she was nervous even as she enjoyed his kisses and closeness, and that made him crosser than ever with her. Did she think he was some sort of animal with no self-control? All in all, the visit was not the happy time Kathy, Barry and the children had expected it to be.

At his mother’s he was hailed as a conquering hero. She was coming to terms with the death of her two sons and was aware that Hitler had still to be beaten or they would have died in vain. But for now Barry, her eldest and favourite son, was home, and it was a pleasure to fuss over him. Barry enjoyed the spoiling and cosseting and couldn’t help comparing it with Kathy’s attitude. She had always to give Rose a hand, or mind her weans, or sit with Bridie a while, or pop to her mother’s. Everyone had a higher priority in Kathy’s life than her husband, Barry thought, and he was bloody sick and tired of it.

Kathy herself was often bone weary, and yet she tried to help her family as she’d always done and keep a demanding husband happy. It was exhausting for her, and an additional worry was Barry’s appetite. It had always been healthy, but now boredom and inactivity – which had never sat easily on Barry’s shoulders – caused him to eat more. Meat rationing had been introduced in March, and early July found tea rationed to two ounces per person. The allowance of fats had changed too, and now each person was allowed two ounces of cooking fat and four of margarine but only two butter. Barry, being a serving soldier, had had none of these restrictions on his food and found it irksome when he couldn’t have a cup of tea whenever he wanted. Even the foods not yet rationed, like eggs and cheese, were in short supply, and luxury foods like biscuits and cakes were very hard to get hold of at all. Barry refused to acknowledge how difficult it was for Kathy to prepare nourishing meals every day. He accused her of moaning and complaining all the rime, and Lizzie and Danny often heard their parents arguing.

Eventually Barry talked the doctor into signing him off before he was fully fit. Kathy watched him go with a mixture of feelings, including relief, because although she would worry about him away fighting, he’d been difficult to live with, like a bear with a sore head, and she knew life would be more peaceful once he was gone.

As for Lizzie, though she was sorry to see her daddy leave again, she hadn’t understood what had made him so cross and scratchy, even with her and Danny. She was almost ashamed that she felt relief to match her mother’s as she watched him walk away, his kit bag on his shoulder.

But she was glad, after Barry left, that she had the doll, the last present her daddy had bought her. She called her Daisy, not for any reason she could think of except that she looked like a Daisy. Every night she cuddled her tight and told her all her worries and fears, and imagined she was talking to her daddy about it all.

She had a big problem of her own at this time, for her mammy had told her to be nice to Sheelagh. ‘She’s lost her daddy,’ Mammy had said. ‘He isn’t ever coming back. She’ll never see him again; think how awful that would be if it was your daddy.’

Lizzie did, but not for long; it was too terrible a thought to hold in her mind. Sheelagh was hard to be nice to, but she told herself she’d try.

The Saturday after Barry left, Bridie and Kathy sent the two girls outside out of the way, while they talked. Lizzie sat down on the step beside her cousin and watched Danny and Matt, who were playing marbles with a crowd of other young boys further up the street. It was hot and dusty, and Lizzie felt sticky with it, and though both girls had their skipping ropes with them, it was far too warm to skip. Lizzie felt uncomfortable with her cousin because she’d said nothing to her yet about Uncle Pat’s death, and so eventually she said, ‘I’m sorry about your daddy.’

‘No you ain’t.’

Whatever Lizzie had expected Sheelagh to say, it wasn’t those words that she spat out so bitterly. ‘Course I am,’ she said. ‘Everyone is.’

‘No you ain’t. No one cares, and my mammy knows it.’

‘How can you say that? I loved my Uncle Pat,’ Lizzie declared. ‘And my daddy did. Everyone did.’

‘Then why didn’t they look after him?’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘They were supposed to look out for one another. That’s what they said when they joined up,’ Sheelagh said.

Lizzie remembered it, but she didn’t know if you could always do that in battles. She knew that lots of others had been killed at Dunkirk as well as her Uncle Pat, and she said so to Sheelagh. ‘My daddy said it was such a mess at Dunkirk, it was a wonder anyone got out alive.’

‘But he did though, didn’t he?’ Sheelagh snapped. ‘And all the others did. Only my daddy was killed, and that wouldn’t have happened if they’d all looked after each other.’

Lizzie was puzzled, unsure of how to argue that point with her cousin. While she was still thinking of a reply, Sheelagh said, ‘Anyway, my mammy said it won’t matter soon. We’re going to lose the war.’

‘No we’re not.’

‘Yes we are. You don’t know anything, you’re only a baby.’

‘I am not.’

‘Oh yes you are, and everyone knows we’re losing,’ Sheelagh said. ‘There’ll be an invasion and we’ll be overrun with Germans, then you’ll see.’

Lizzie didn’t ask what she’d see; she was too frightened by what Sheelagh had said.

‘Then you’ll be sorry,’ Sheelagh went on, ‘’cos do you know what they do to the men in the countries they rule?’

‘No,’ said Lizzie in a scared little voice.

‘They shoot them,’ Sheelagh said in grim satisfaction. ‘They stand them against the wall and shoot them, and then you won’t have a daddy either.’

Lizzie gasped in horror. ‘It’s not true,’ she said. ‘It isn’t. They don’t do that.’

‘Yes they do,’ Sheelagh said, delighted she’d managed to terrify her cousin. ‘They’ve done it already in France, and my mammy told me they do it everywhere.’

‘But they won’t invade us, our air force will stop them,’ Lizzie burst in.

‘They won’t be able to do anything,’ Sheelagh said dismissively.

Both girls knew the war was going badly; everyone knew. It was all that was talked about and it made the adults bad-tempered. Since the evacuation of Dunkirk, the Luftwaffe had been making sporadic raids on coastal towns in an effort to smash their defences and destroy ships, and everyone knew that was just the beginning. Invasion was the word on everyone’s lips. ‘Do you think we’ll be invaded, Mammy?’ Lizzie asked her mother later, desperate for reassurance after her cousin’s revelations.

Kathy sighed. ‘I don’t know, pet. I hope not.’

It wasn’t what Lizzie wanted to hear. ‘We’re not going to lose the war, are we?’ she asked desperately.

‘It’s in God’s hands, pet,’ Kathy said. ‘We must pray about it.’

Lizzie didn’t want it to be just in God’s hands. She thought he’d made a bad enough fist of it already, and she didn’t understand about praying either. The priests and teachers urged them to pray for peace, but what sort of peace? The sort where Hitler did what he wanted, for she couldn’t see him just giving up, and especially now, when most people thought he was winning. She could pray for Britain to win the war, but they couldn’t do that without killing German people, and surely that was wrong too. Anyway, she thought, if God was everywhere, like the priests said, and if he knew everything, why did she have to pray at all? Her mother was no good, Lizzie realised. She was as scared of defeat as Lizzie herself.

The schools broke up and the Battle of Britain began in earnest, and Lizzie found she could go nowhere without having Sheelagh in tow.

‘Don’t be selfish,’ Kathy admonished when Lizzie complained. ‘Think of poor Sheelagh, who has no daddy.’

Lizzie did think of her, but she didn’t see how trailing after her would make her cousin get over her loss quicker. They’d never got on, and in the past Sheelagh had always tried to make Lizzie look small and scorn her ideas. Now she seemed to hold her almost personally responsible for her father’s death, and Lizzie found her constant verbal attacks hard to take. She didn’t bother complaining, for she knew it would get her nowhere. Grown-up decisions, she knew, often made little sense, but there was no point arguing with them.

But there was no skipping off now to play with Maura Mahon, for Kathy was firm. Sheelagh, she said, needed her cousin. Maura didn’t understand Lizzie’s sudden devotion to a girl she’d always professed to detest and so thought she was being huffy with her, and Lizzie could have been upset about it if she’d had time.

But the point was, her free time was limited, for her mammy and Aunt Rose and Aunt Maggie, all heavily pregnant, needed her to give a hand. And then there was Auntie Bridie at the door: could Lizzie go a message or help turn the mangle for her, or scrub the step or wash the pots? Poor wee Sheelagh wasn’t able to give her a hand at all, she was too upset, but Lizzie was a grand girl altogether and Bridie was sure she didn’t mind and she must be a fine help to her mother, and Lizzie was pig sick about the whole thing.

Rose’s pains started in the early hours of Friday morning, just five days after the beginning of the summer holidays. The first Lizzie and her mother knew of it was when Mary walked in the entry door just as they’d finished breakfast holding Nuala and Peter by the hand. ‘Has she started then?’ Kathy said.

‘This long while, and no sign yet,’ Mary said. ‘I’ve been over there half the night. We could do with you if you can come. Bella Amis is after fetching the doctor.’

‘The doctor?’ Kathy echoed, hardly able to believe it. Bella Amis was the midwife, and all most women needed. To have a doctor usually meant trouble. Lizzie’s eyes had opened wide in surprise and noticing them, Kathy, with a glance at Rose’s two bemused children, asked quietly, ‘Is she bad?’

‘Bad enough,’ Mary answered shortly. ‘I must get back. I wondered, could Lizzie mind the weans?’

‘Of course,’ Kathy said, answering for her daughter.

There was a click as the entry door opened again and Sheelagh slunk into the room. Lizzie’s heart sank.

‘And here’s Sheelagh to help you,’ Mary said, handing Lizzie a list, ration books and a purse. ‘You can fetch your aunt’s rations first, and I’ve put an extra sixpence in the purse so you can get a wee treat for yourself.’ She passed over the shopping bags to Lizzie and added, ‘When you’ve done that, take them out for the day. To the park or somewhere, to get them out of the way for now.’

‘Can I take them down the Bull Ring?’

‘Aye, that’s a good idea,’ Mary said. ‘Anywhere will do, and there’s plenty to see in the Bull Ring.’

As the door closed on the two women, Nuala began to cry and Peter’s eyes were very bright and shiny, and Lizzie realised they were both very frightened without knowing why. She bent down and put her arms around them. ‘Don’t cry,’ she said. ‘Soon you’ll have a wee baby brother or sister, and that’s nothing to cry over.’

The children looked at her in astonishment, and Lizzie realised they probably hadn’t even known their mother was expecting. She certainly didn’t look as though she was; whereas Lizzie’s own mother and her Aunt Maggie resembled a couple of huge whales, Rose hadn’t changed her shape that much at all. She thought they might have picked up something in the adults’ conversation, but it was obvious from their amazement at what she said that they hadn’t.

‘Baby?’ Nuala said, her tears forgotten.

‘A baby,’ Peter said. ‘Is Mammy having a baby?’

‘She surely is,’ Lizzie answered. ‘D’you want a wee boy or a wee girl?’

‘A boy,’ Peter said stoutly. ‘Girls are stupid.’ He glanced over at his sister and added, ‘Nuala’s stupid.’

‘No she isn’t,’ Lizzie said, but she laughed at the determined look on Peter’s face. ‘She’s just wee. You were much the same at her age.’

Peter looked as if he might dispute that, so before he was able to, Lizzie said, ‘Come on, let’s get the rations fetched and then we can have the rest of the day.’

She picked Nuala up to dump her in the pram that her grandma had left outside the door, and said to Sheelagh, ‘You coming?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Sheelagh said. ‘Shopping with weans is not my idea of fun, but I’ll go down to the Bull Ring with you later.’

‘Oh, please yourself,’ Lizzie said in exasperation.

She strapped Nuala in her pram and stuck her tongue out at Sheelagh before going off down the road.

Pickering’s grocery store lay one side of the O’Malley home, and Morcroft’s the other, and people went to whichever one they were registered at. As Rose was registered at Morcroft’s, that was where Lizzie went. There was a queue as always, Lizzie noticed. She parked Nuala’s pram outside and went in, holding Peter by the hand.

She saw Maura Mahon just in front of her and smiled at her, but Maura pretended not to see her, so she sidled up alongside. ‘Hello, Maura,’ she said.

‘Oh, hello,’ Maura said, and then, letting her eyes scan the shop, remarked sarcastically, ‘Sheelagh’s not with you?’

Lizzie flushed. ‘Don’t be like that. I told you how it is. My mammy makes me take her about with me.’

‘Well, where is she today, then?’

‘She wouldn’t come. I was sent to fetch Aunt Rose’s rations, but only to get the weans out of the way, ’cos my aunt’s started,’ Lizzie said. ‘After that I’m to take them down the Bull Ring, and you can bet our Sheelagh wants to come there.’

‘Oh, I’d love to go down the Bull Ring,’ Maura said. Maura, like Lizzie, often went down there with her mother, usually late on Saturday afternoon to catch the bargains in meat and vegetables, and it was always entertaining. Lately, though, Kathy had been too tired for the trek, so Lizzie herself hadn’t been for a few weeks. Suddenly a spirit of mischief seized her. Why shouldn’t she go now, just her and Maura? If she didn’t go back to the house, Sheelagh would never know.

‘Let’s go together,’ she said. ‘Now.’

‘Just us?’

‘And the weans,’ Lizzie said. ‘I must take them, but they’ll be no trouble.’

‘What about the rations?’ Maura said. ‘And your Sheelagh?’

‘Grandma’s not waiting on the rations, I know,’ Lizzie said, and added rudely, ‘As for Sheelagh, she can…she can go to the devil, for all I care.’

‘Och, Lizzie, what would Father Flaherty say?’ Maura said, and the girls’ spluttering laughter caught the attention of Mr Morcroft.

‘Now then, you two, what’s to do?’ he said.

Lizzie handed over the list, the ration books and the shopping bags, and Mrs Morcroft, looking over her husband’s shoulder, said, ‘Is your aunt bad again, pet?’

‘She’s having the baby, I think,’ Lizzie said. ‘Only it’s taking a while. I have to keep the weans away from the house.’

‘God, but hasn’t she had a tough time of it?’ Mrs Morcroft said. ‘And you’re a grand girl, Lizzie, to be minding the children. Leave the bags and list here and we’ll make them up for you.’ She leant into the till, extracted a threepenny bit and gave it to Lizzie. ‘And that’s for yourself,’ she said, ‘for being such a good girl.’

Lizzie smiled and thanked her, and added it to the sixpence her gran had given her, then waited while Maura collected her purchases. They had to go back to Maura’s house to deliver the groceries and ask Mrs Mahon if Maura could go to the Bull Ring with Lizzie. This suited Lizzie, for Maura lived just off Bell Barn Road in Spring Street, which was the opposite way from the O’Malley house. From there they could go along Sun Street and out on to Bristol Street without anyone in her house or Rose’s knowing anything about it.

Mrs Mahon gave Maura one and sixpence to get kippers if there were any cheap, and Lizzie realised with a jolt that it was Friday and possibly she too would have been asked to bring back kippers or fish pieces for tea, as they couldn’t eat meat on Fridays. Eggs used to be a good standby, but even they were hard to come by these days. She knew she’d catch it when she got home, but she didn’t care. Even if she was going to be killed at the end of it, she might as well enjoy herself. It was ages since she’d been out somewhere with Maura as they used to, before the war changed everything.

Lizzie did have a few pangs of guilt as they made their way along Sun Street. She was acting totally out of character, for she’d been trained from when she was little to be helpful to others, and it was in her nature to be considerate too, but the last few weeks had been very trying, and made more so by Sheelagh tagging behind her everywhere. Surely I can have one day off? Lizzie thought to herself, and I’m not going just on my own, I’ve got Pete and Nuala with me. She knew in her heart of hearts that her mother wouldn’t see it the same way, but she gave a defiant lift to her head and smiled across to Maura, and Maura, who knew some of Lizzie’s train of thought, said, ‘It’ll be grand, you’ll see.’

SIX

It was a tidy step to the Bull Ring, but the girls had done it many a time. Trams cost money, and neither Kathy nor Mrs Mahon were keen on throwing their money about. They set a brisk pace along Bristol Street while Nuala bounced about in her pram and laughed and waved her arms and Peter trotted along beside them holding the pram handle. ‘Isn’t this great?’ Lizzie said. ‘Just the two of us, without my moaning cousin spoiling anything.’

‘She is awful,’ Maura agreed. ‘Why does your mammy make you take her around with you all the time?’

‘Och, who can understand mothers?’ Lizzie said with a shrug. ‘Mammy says it’s because she’s lost her daddy, but I don’t see that hanging on to me helps. I mean, I don’t like her and I never have, and she doesn’t like me.’ She stopped a minute and then went on, ‘I think she sticks to me to be spiteful, because she knows I hate it. She’s always either giving out or moaning at me, and when she’s with her friends at school, she makes fun of me all the time.’

‘Poor you,’ Maura sympathised. ‘How long d’you think your mammy will make you take her about?’

‘I don’t know,’ Lizzie said, turning the pram into Bromsgrove Street, and added gloomily, ‘I hope it doesn’t last till the war ends.’

‘That might not be long, though, mightn’t it?’ Maura said almost in a whisper. She looked about to see if anyone was listening and then said, ‘Some people think we’re going to lose, and soon.’

Hearing Maura say the same thing as Sheelagh caused Lizzie to snap, ‘Don’t be stupid, that’s a crazy thing to say.’

‘No it isn’t,’ Maura said. ‘Everyone thinks there will be an invasion.’

Lizzie couldn’t deny that. ‘It doesn’t mean we’ll lose, though,’ she said obstinately.

She was so upset by Maura unknowingly backing Sheelagh’s theories on the progress of the war that she’d increased the speed she was pushing the pram and was unaware of it until suddenly Pete, unable to take the pace, tripped and pitched forward. He’d skinned both knees and was bawling loud enough to wake the dead. Lizzie bent down and pulled him to his feet, putting her arms around him while she examined his injuries. ‘Don’t cry,’ she said, spitting on the hem of her dress and rubbing the grime gently from his knees with it. ‘It isn’t much. Look.’

Pete looked. He’d stopped crying, but the tears were still visible on his cheeks and lurked on his eyelashes, and Lizzie knew he was liable to start again any minute. ‘They sting,’ he whined.

‘I know,’ Lizzie sympathised. ‘Tell you what, I’ll lift you up on to the pram and you can have a ride, how’s that?’

Pete looked at the pram and then at the length of Bromsgrove Street stretching before them. ‘How much further is it?’ he asked.

‘Still a fair bit,’ Maura told him, and added to Lizzie, ‘But you don’t have to go on as if you were in some sort of race. No wonder Pete fell over. It’s too hot to rush about like that, I’m boiling already myself.’

‘I’ll ride,’ Pete said suddenly, and Lizzie lifted him up on to the pram, thankful he wasn’t going to make more of a fuss. Maura was right, she realised, because as the morning wore on it had become hotter and she was feeling prickly with it already. So with Peter settled at the bottom of the pram opposite his sister, the two girls went at a more leisurely pace.

Lizzie didn’t want to discuss the war any more, so she said to Maura, ‘Tell me about when you was evacuated.’

‘What about it?’

‘Well, why didn’t you like it?’ Lizzie asked. ‘’Cos I haven’t ever been to the countryside. What’s it like?’

‘Well, when I was there, everything was always dripping wet,’ Maura said. ‘There weren’t proper pavements, just muddy lanes and soaking wet fields. There were great big cows and smelly pigs and dogs that barked all the time.’

‘Was she nice, the woman you were sent to?’

Maura shrugged. ‘She was all right,’ she said. ‘’Cept she made me take my shoes off at the door, ’cos they were always muddy. She said I needed wellingtons, but I didn’t have none. It was freezing on her lino and kitchen tiles in my socks. It was all right for her, she had big fluffy slippers, but I didn’t.’

Lizzie nodded. She knew her mother had no money for slippers either.

‘Mammy was mad,’ Maura went on. ‘She said I’d catch my death of cold, and it was cold, everything was blinking cold.’

‘What about your brothers?’

‘Oh, Harry and Gerry went to someone else,’ Maura said. ‘It was on a farm and they wanted big strapping boys and they quite liked it, but Mammy took us all back at Christmas.’

‘I’m glad I didn’t go,’ Lizzie said. ‘It sounds horrible.’

‘Well, you didn’t miss much,’ Maura said. ‘And there’s never been any bombs falling either, has there?’

‘No,’ Lizzie said uncertainly. ‘But Daddy said that there will be.’

‘Och, my mammy said if they were going to bomb Birmingham, they’d have done it already,’ Maura said airily. ‘She said we’re safe enough two hundred miles from the coast.’

‘Daddy said something about a landmine flattening the house.’

‘I don’t think that will happen, do you?’

‘I don’t know,’ Lizzie admitted. ‘But I hope not.’

They turned into Jamaica Row as they talked and could see the spire of the Bull Ring’s church and Times Furnishing on the corner of High Street. The crowds had increased around them as they neared the Bull Ring, and Lizzie felt the familiar excitement as she turned the pram and looked for a moment at the teeming mass of people on the hill running down towards the Bull Ring proper.

The statue of Nelson surrounded by railings was in the centre, with the barrows selling their wares to the right of it stretching from Bell Street down past Woolworth’s to Edgbaston Street. Smithfield Market and Rag Alley were to the left, and towering above it all was St Martin’s in the Field Church, with all the flower sellers around it.

Lizzie had a job to hold the pram on the steep incline down to the market, and she lifted Pete out to make it easier and he held the pram handle. The cobbled streets gave Nuala a bumpy ride and she seemed to enjoy it, for she squealed in delight.

Once among the thronging crowds, Lizzie was afraid of losing Pete and warned him to stay close with no wandering off, but there were such interesting things to see and hear, he was very tempted. All around traders plied their wares, fruit, vegetables, fish and meat interspersed with stalls selling curtain material, bedding, antiques and cheap crockery in baskets.

The cries of the vendors, mixed with the voices of those bartering with customers and the general crush of people, made a clamorous noise everywhere, but there was a buzz about the whole place that most of the shoppers seemed to feel. It had a special smell too, as the aromas of all the different things for sale rose on the air. Over all the bustle, one voice rang out loud and clear, and that was the bag lady chanting ‘’Andy carriers, ’andy carriers.’ She was very old, toothless and blind, and had a label round her neck saying so and she’d been there as long as Lizzie and Maura could remember, selling her paper carrier bags in all weathers.

Maura was holding Pete’s hand tightly as he’d made more than one dash for freedom as they looked around the stalls. ‘Hello, ducks, what you after then?’ the stall holders would enquire, but Maura and Lizzie would just smile and shake their heads. They passed Solly’s fish cart and greeted him, but he hadn’t reduced the fish yet so Maura kept her money in her pocket.

Peacock’s store beckoned, and they took the children to gaze in wonder at the wide array of toys. There were dolls of all shapes and sizes from the cheap to the dear, and beautiful prams and cribs for them like those for a real baby, but Lizzie noted with satisfaction that none of the dolls was as beautiful as her dear Daisy. Pete was more interested in the railway made of tin, and the metal cars, and the little lead soldiers in the fort. None of the children had toys like these and to them it was like an Aladdin’s cave. Eventually Lizzie turned the pram and they went on to Woolworth’s, where nothing cost more than sixpence. Maura said, ‘Bit of a swizz, though, my mammy says.’

‘Why?’

‘’Cos they sell a teapot for sixpence and then the lid for another sixpence. I mean, a lid’s no good on its own, is it?’

‘Well, no,’ Lizzie agreed, but added, ‘Though it’s useful to be able to buy another lid if you break one, and anyway Woolworth’s sells lots of other things.’

Maura couldn’t argue with that. The two girls particularly liked the counters with the jewellery, rings with sparkling diamonds, or red glass stones that shone like rubies. There were necklaces of pearl, and a wide variety of brooches, earrings and bracelets, and all for sixpence. ‘I’m going to buy some of this jewellery when I’m working,’ Maura said, and Lizzie thought she might too. Then there was the counter with the pretty hairslides and bands and silver-backed brushes and matching combs, and all manner of other items to make their hair beautiful. Lizzie sighed and said, ‘I wish I had bands like this, don’t you?’

‘Oh aye, and some pretty ribbons,’ Maura said wistfully.

‘Let me see,’ Pete demanded.

Lizzie laughed at him. ‘What do you need to see for, Pete? Choosing a ribbon for your own hair, are you?’

Pete stuck out his bottom lip obstinately. He hated being made fun of and he aimed a kick at Lizzie’s shins, which she side-stepped neatly. She grasped her young cousin by the shoulders and gave him a shake. ‘If you don’t behave, I won’t take you to see the clock.’

‘What clock?’

‘You’ll never know unless you’re good.’

‘Put him back up on the pram,’ Maura suggested. ‘He’ll see all he wants then.’

Lizzie saw the sense of that and dumped Pete at the bottom end of the pram again, and they all stopped to drool longingly over the sweet counter. ‘How much have we got altogether?’ Maura asked.

‘Eleven pence,’ Lizzie said. ‘Sixpence from Gran, threepence from Mrs Morcroft and tuppence from your mammy.’

‘Not enough, is it?’

‘It might be, but we’d better save it, ’cos we’ll be hungry later,’ Lizzie said.

Regretfully they turned away from the beautiful array of sweets, out into the thronging market again. Next door to Woolworth’s was the plywood model shop, Hobbies, and they stood for a minute to let the little ones see the model yachts, trains and cars arranged in the window before crossing the market to the bottom of the steps leading to the Market Hall.

To one side of the steps stood an ex-serviceman from the Great War selling razor blades from a tray around his neck, and on the other side another ex-army man, who was also blind, sold shoelaces. ‘Black or brown, best in town!’ he’d cry, over and over. Lizzie always felt sorry for the old soldiers – her daddy said there were many like them, just thrown on to the scrap heap – but she hadn’t money spare to buy things she didn’t need, so she averted her eyes and brought her mind back to the problem in hand.

‘How we going to get up there?’ Maura asked.

‘I suppose if our Pete walks up we could carry the pram,’ Lizzie suggested.

‘Are you kidding?’ Maura said. She thought a minute and said, ‘You could leave the pram at the bottom.’

‘I’d have to carry Nuala everywhere then,’ Lizzie complained. ‘And what if someone walked off with the pram while we’re inside?’

‘What’s up, duck?’ said a man at a nearby stall. ‘You want to go up the market?’

‘Um, yes,’ Lizzie said. ‘Yes please, but the pram…’

‘No trouble,’ the man said. He lifted Pete off the pram and called to his mate. ‘Come on, Fred, these two lasses want to get up the steps with the pram and the babby. Give us a hand.’

They lifted the pram, Nuala and all, and carried the whole lot up the steps, while Pete ran up alongside holding Maura and Lizzie’s hands. Once inside the Market Hall he stood and stared wide-eyed. The ceilings were high and criss-crossed with beams, and long metal poles led down from the beams to hold up the roof. High arched windows lined the sides of the hall, with lower ones at the ends, and stalls of every description lay before them. The noise was incredible.

They hadn’t gone very far when the clock began to strike. Until that moment, neither Pete nor Nuala had noticed the clock, but now they watched it spellbound. Lizzie noticed that most people did, even grown-ups, and the hubbub around them died down as the figures of three knights and a lady struck the bell twelve times. ‘Is that the clock you said about?’ Pete asked when it was all over.

‘That’s it,’ Lizzie said, ‘and if you keep being a good boy, I’ll take you to see the animals.’

Pete beamed. ‘There’s animals?’ he cried disbelievingly.

Maura laughed at the little boy’s amazed face. ‘You wait and see,’ she said. ‘My mammy used to bring me here for a treat when I was about your age.’

There were stalls for everything in the Market Hall, and although the smell of fish lingered, it didn’t seem to matter and even added a little to the atmosphere of the place. There were flower stalls, clothes stalls and material stalls, and the junk stalls sold a wide array of interesting objects. There were stalls selling fruit and vegetables, fresh fish and meat and cheese. There were people setting pots and pans and other kitchen utensils, and there were stalls piled with sweets, toys, haberdashery and knick-knacks.

Pimm’s pet shop drew the children like a magnet, for none of them owned pets of their own. The canaries twittered around them in their cages as the children stared, and even Nuala clamoured to be let down. There were mewing kittens and boisterous puppies that nipped their fingers playfully as they tumbled about the large box that held them. They saw fish swimming endlessly around their bowls, and baby rabbits and guinea pigs in their cages, and they stopped by the budgies to try and teach them to talk. Pete didn’t believe they could, and although Maura and Lizzie repeated over and over, ‘Who’s a pretty boy then?’ none of the birds co-operated and copied them. In the end they gave up and Pete said triumphantly, ‘See, told you they couldn’t talk. You must think I’m stupid.’

Lizzie laughed and cuffed Pete lightly around the head, and he yelled, ‘Gerroff!’ but any further protests were stopped by the clock striking again.

‘Two o’clock,’ Maura exclaimed in disbelief. We’d better get going. I’m starving, aren’t you?’

‘Not half,’ Lizzie agreed, bouncing the pram back to the Market Hall entrance.

Willing customers carried the pram down the steps for them, and once on the cobbles Maura said, ‘Sniff that.’

Lizzie didn’t have to; she could already smell the joints of meat roasting in Mountford’s shop window, and it made her mouth water. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘my stomach thinks my throat’s cut.’

They couldn’t afford a meat sandwich because it cost sixpence, and anyway it was Friday, so instead they bought a cone of baked potatoes for a penny each, with a slice of bread dipped in gravy for Nuala. ‘Are you sure she should be eating that?’ Maura asked.

Lizzie wasn’t really certain, but she shrugged and said, ‘Surely eating meat doesn’t count when you’re only a baby?’

‘I don’t know,’ Maura said. ‘But then, sure, she has to eat something.’

Nuala certainly seemed to enjoy her slice of dipped bread. She ate every bit and all told didn’t make much mess at all. Pete finished his cone of potatoes and licked his fingers and said, ‘I’m thirsty now,’ and Lizzie realised she was too.

‘Have we enough for drinks?’ Maura asked.

‘Not if we want sweets,’ Lizzie said. ‘But we can get threepence worth of over-ripe fruit that might cure the thirst, and still have money for some sweets too.’

Everyone agreed with that suggestion and they wandered down to the bottom where the cheaper barrows were and got some bruised apples, soft oranges and bananas going brown. They demolished them in quick order, sitting on a bench by the horse trough near St Martin’s, where Pete was entertained by the trams that came rattling up Moor Street.

Then they made their way to the sweet stall, where they pored over the goodly selection on sale. Gobstoppers lasted forever, but pear drops tasted better, and toffee was nice but would make them thirsty again. Eventually they bought a stick of liquorice at a halfpenny each, and two penn’orth of pear drops. Nuala had fallen asleep in the pram with her thumb in her mouth, so she didn’t have to be considered as they shared the sweets out among themselves.

‘We’ll have to be off soon,’ Lizzie said. ‘It’s a tidy step home and time must be getting on.’

‘Aye, I’ll have to get Mammy’s fish,’ Maura said. ‘If it’s gone down enough in price.’

Before that, though, Pete was enchanted by the day-old chicks a man had for sale by Nelson’s Square. They did look sweet, like little yellow fluff balls, and Pete was all for taking one home. Lizzie and Maura had a hard job to convince him that the chick would grow to a hen, and hens couldn’t be kept in a back-to-back house with no garden.

Pete had reached the mutinous stage when Maura spotted the man walking round with the tray of mechanical toys and successfully distracted his attention. He watched the toys jumping around the tray in open-mouthed astonishment, and Lizzie stayed with him while Maura got a huge parcel of kippers for her mother for one and six. She stored it at the bottom of the pram and they set off home. Pete’s legs were tired, and Lizzie tucked him in beside the fish, and even though the hill up to High Street was steep and she was puffed at the top of it, she left Pete where he was. It was a long way home, she thought, for legs as short as his.

All the way back, while Nuala slumbered, the two girls told Peter tales about the Bull Ring on a Saturday. ‘It’s better then,’ Maura said. ‘Late afternoon and evening’s the best time, and the food is nearly given away, my mammy says.’

‘Aye, but that’s not all,’ Lizzie said. ‘They have stilt walkers and a man in chains – all tied up, he is, and you wouldn’t think how he’d get out of it, but he always does.’

‘Aye, when the money in the hat is a pound or more,’ Maura reminded her. ‘And there’s a fire-eater and a man that lies on a bed of nails and lets other people walk on him.’

‘And others play music and sing,’ Lizzie said. ‘And a feller called Jimmy Jesus preaches from the Bible. He’s got long white hair and a beard and that’s why he’s called Jesus.’

Pete’s mouth dropped open in astonishment as he drank in all the two girls told him, scarcely able to believe it was true. ‘We’ll take you one day, Pete,’ Lizzie promised. ‘If your mammy says it’s all right, you can come with me and Maura. We’ll stay till the Sally Army brass band comes marching down Corporation Street. Later they give all the tramps soup at the Citadel. Jimmy Jesus too, so my daddy said anyway.’

‘Oh, they do,’ Maura said. ‘It’s great down the Bull Ring, isn’t it?’

‘Nowhere like it,’ Lizzie agreed. ‘And it was worth it today, even if I’m never allowed out again for a whole year.’

‘Och, course you will be,’ Maura said confidently. ‘They’ll just shout a bit, that’s all.’

Lizzie didn’t answer, for Maura didn’t know how her Mammy could go on, not to mention her Auntie Bridie, and whatever Maura said, she knew she was going to catch it.

She said goodbye to Maura at her door and went along Bell Barn Road to collect the rations before she dared go home. ‘How’s your aunt, dear?’ Mrs Morcroft asked, and Lizzie realised with a jolt she hadn’t thought about Auntie Rose and the reason for her jaunt to the Bull Ring all day. She wasn’t terribly worried – after all, women had babies all the time, and even though her gran said she’d had to have the doctor, it didn’t really mean she was deadly sick – so she said quite cheerfully, ‘All right, I suppose, Mrs Morcroft, but I don’t know, we’ve been out all day.’

She was more concerned when she got to Rose’s house and found no one in. She left the children in the pram outside and pounded upstairs. The bed was stripped and had a big stain across it, and there was bed linen soiled with blood thrown into a corner. Alarmed, Lizzie ran downstairs and pushed the pram across the road to her own house, but that was also empty, so then she ran, pushing the pram before her, past Pickering’s to her grandma’s.

She lifted Pete down and hauled Nuala from her straps, suddenly aware that not only was the little girl sopping wet, but that something was seeping from her nappy on to Lizzie’s dress as she balanced Nuala on her hip to open the entry door.

They were all there, Kathy, Maggie and Carmel, and they all turned at her entrance. ‘Where in the name of God have you been?’ Kathy demanded.

‘D-down the Bull Ring. Grandma told me to take the weans.’

‘She meant you to take them all,’ Kathy said. ‘Dear God, girl, you’re not stupid, and I’d keep out of Bridie’s way if I were you. She’s been spitting feathers all day, and Sheelagh’s done nothing but moan.’

‘Aye, as if we hadn’t enough on our plate,’ Maggie said bitterly. ‘It wouldn’t have hurt Bridie to look to her own weans the once, for she was worse than useless here, and Lizzie at least kept the wee ones away for the day.’

‘What d’you mean?’ Lizzie cried, suddenly frightened. ‘What’s happened?’

Kathy glanced at her sisters and then at her daughter, and said, ‘Rose has been sent to the hospital, the doctor thought it best.’

‘Will she…she will be all right, won’t she?’

‘Course she will,’ Kathy said, but she didn’t meet Lizzie’s eyes as she said it.

Lizzie knew her mother was worried and wasn’t sure if Rose was going to be all right at all, and she hoped Peter and Nuala weren’t aware of it. But both had picked up on the tension, and Nuala said, ‘Mammy, want Mammy,’ and began to wail.

‘Och, there’s no need to cry,’ Kathy said, lifting Nuala into her arms. ‘Your mammy will be as right as rain, you’ll see. Grandma Sullivan has gone with her, so there’s no need to fret at all, and you’re both to come home with me tonight.’

She set Nuala on her feet again, wiped her hand down her apron and asked Lizzie, ‘Hasn’t that child been changed all day?’

‘No,’ Lizzie said. ‘I didn’t come back for a change for her.’

‘You didn’t come back because you didn’t want Sheelagh with you, if we’re telling the truth,’ Kathy said.

‘You can’t blame her,’ Maggie said.

‘Maybe you can’t, but I can,’ Kathy snapped. ‘She knows she has to be understanding to Sheelagh just at the minute.’

‘It’s like being understanding to a rattlesnake.’ Carmel said it under her breath so Kathy didn’t hear, but Lizzie did, and grinned at her young aunt.

‘And you can take that silly smile off your face,’ Kathy said. ‘I’m sure I never said anything to laugh at. You can come across to Rose’s with me to get a few things for the weans for tonight and tomorrow. Bring Nuala and you can change her and make her more comfortable.’

‘We’ll rustle up something to eat,’ Maggie said. ‘We might as well eat together tonight, and Daddy will be in any minute.’

‘Aye,’ Kathy said. ‘Life goes on, and Lord knows when we’ll see Mammy.’

Bridie went for Lizzie that night as she’d known she would, and she stood and took it without a word, feeling it was just punishment, for she felt guilty to be out enjoying herself while her Aunt Rose lay so ill. ‘I’m sorry, Aunt Bridie,’ she said, when eventually the tirade had stopped.

Bridie looked at Lizzie through narrowed eyes, not at all sure that she wasn’t being sarcastic, but she thought she looked suitably chastened. ‘Yes, well,’ she said, ‘I mean, being sorry is all very well, but it was a terrible thing to do. Poor wee Sheelagh cried her eyes out and then—’

Kathy cut in then, deciding enough was enough. ‘The child has said sorry, Bridie,’ she said. ‘Let that be the end of it now. What do you want her to do? Grovel on the floor?’

Lizzie looked at her mother in amazement and Bridie snapped, ‘You just encourage her with that attitude.’

‘Encourage her?’ Kathy exclaimed. ‘It was hardly the crime of the century, Bridie. She went for a wee jaunt to the Bull Ring with a friend, that’s all.’

‘She was supposed to come back for Sheelagh.’

‘There was nothing to stop Sheelagh going along to the Bull Ring on her own,’ Kathy said sharply. ‘She said Lizzie had told her where they were going. Anyway she’s sorry now.’ She looked across to Lizzie and said, ‘You won’t do it again, sure you won’t?’

And Lizzie was certain sure her mammy gave her a huge wink. ‘No, Mammy,’ she said.

Bridie glared at the two of them, but no one cared for that and when she left just afterwards, Lizzie felt she could breathe more easily. Kathy gave a smile and said, ‘Phew! I’m glad that’s over with. Now don’t be forgetting Aunt Rose in your prayers tonight.’

‘I won’t,’ Lizzie promised but she smiled because she knew her mammy wasn’t cross with her any more and she disliked Bridie and her way of going on as much as she did herself.

Rose didn’t die, as had been feared, and neither did her tiny baby girl, whom she called Josephine after her mother, but the pair of them were very ill and were still in hospital a week later when Maggie and Kathy both gave birth to baby boys on 30 July. Kathy called her son Padraic, after her beloved brother Pat, and Maggie named her baby Tim, and by the middle of August Lizzie had forgotten there was such a thing as a holiday, for she was run off her feet.

Eventually Kathy and Maggie were both up and about again. Their two boys were placid and good sleepers. In contrast, little Josie, tinier by far than her plump, healthy-looking cousins, still cried often, wouldn’t settle and refused to suckle. She had to be put on the bottle, which made Rose feel a failure on top of everything else. She was very weak herself, and often tired, and a demanding baby as well as the other two little ones made things harder for her.

Kathy was unable to do much for Rose, for she had her own family to see to, Bridie never off the doorstep and Barry’s mother Molly to visit, but Maggie and Mary both tried to help. All the family were worried about Rose and wee Josie and took Pete and Nuala off her hands as often as they could.

The first bombs fell in Birmingham on the night of 8 August, leaving one person dead and five injured. Many thought the lone German bomber was actually looking for Fort Dunlop, but was unable to find it in the black-out and dropped his load in Erdington instead. Kathy knew that the battle was on now and the phoney war was over, and she prepared her cellar as if for a siege, while sporadic bombing raids took place in various parts of the city throughout August. She lugged mattresses down the stone steps, and told the astonished children that in future they would sleep with her in her bed. If they were woken by a raid, they were to put on their shoes and their outdoor coats, which Kathy would leave at the end of the bed. If they could drag their eiderdowns after them without tripping themselves up, so much the better. Danny was in charge of the torch, and Lizzie was responsible for Kathy’s box containing the ration books, identity cards and post office savings book. Kathy would follow with the baby in the large wicker basket that she was using for a cradle just now, and she assured the children they’d be as safe as houses.

On the night of 25 August, the children hadn’t been in bed long when the siren went off. Kathy wasn’t too worried, though she urged them to hurry. They’d had plenty of these skirmishes that had turned out to be nothing, and she crept down behind the children, carrying the sleeping Padraic, and hoping it would be over soon.

She met Bridie coming in through the cellar door – she’d given her sister-in-law a key as it saved time – and they settled the children on the mattresses, cuddled up with the eiderdowns. Kathy made tea and produced biscuits, and it began to take on the air of a picnic.

When the droning planes came so near that they could hear the whine and whistle of the bombs and the shuddering crashes as they descended on the city centre, the children’s eyes opened wider with fear. Kathy’s blood seemed to freeze in her veins, and she looked at Bridie and saw stark terror in her face as the ack-ack guns began the attack.

Matt, Danny and Sheelagh began to howl. Lizzie wanted to cry too – she’d never in all her life been as scared – but she noticed that her mammy wasn’t crying, so she decided she wouldn’t either. She held herself so rigid on the mattress, with her hands balled into fists beside her, that she shook slightly, but no tears slid down her cheeks.

The noise was incredible, the ferocious blasts and crashes hurt Lizzie’s ears, and in the middle of it came a furious knocking at the entry door at the top of the cellar steps. Kathy’s startled eyes met those of Bridie. Who would knock at the door in the middle of a raid? But whoever it was, it must be trouble, and with a feeling of dread she crossed the room.

As Kathy was about to open the cellar door, Lizzie threw herself at her mother. ‘No, Mammy!’ It was almost a scream, and Lizzie’s eyes looked wild as she pleaded, ‘Don’t, don’t go up there.’

Kathy understood how Lizzie felt; God, she felt it herself. She took her daughter’s protesting hands in her own and said gently, ‘I must see who it is, Lizzie.’ Then she gave her a little push away and added, ‘Go on now, be a good girl. I’ll be back in a minute.’ Lizzie said nothing more, but stood watching her mother go up the cellar steps.

Kathy swung open the entry door. In the dim light she could just make out the figures of two ARP wardens. One cradled little Josie in a blanket and the other had Nuala in her arms and was supporting Rose, who held tight to Pete’s hand.

‘What in God’s name…?’ The words were almost lost in the deafening crash terrifyingly near. Kathy tasted dust in her mouth, and there was an acrid smell in her nose.

‘Found her in the street, missus,’ said one of the wardens, as Kathy pulled her sister-in-law inside and took Josie from the woman’s arms. ‘Trying to get to her ma’s with the children. Your place was closer, so we brought her here.’

‘Yes, of course, you did right,’ Kathy said.

‘We’ll leave you to it, then, missus,’ the other warden said, setting little Nuala on her feet.

‘Yes, thank you. Thank you for bringing her.’

Rose had not uttered a word. Kathy closed the door and turned to the trembling woman. ‘Can you manage the steps?’ she asked in a loud voice, as if she had to rouse her in some way. Rose nodded, and Lizzie ran up to help her mother bring the little ones down to the comparative safety of the cellar, while the pounding went on all around them.

It was a little while later before Rose could begin to explain. At first Kathy was involved with practicalities, such as dealing with the shivering children and the restless baby, who’d begun to wail in a cross, tired voice. Kathy soothed Josie while Lizzie tucked the little ones under the eiderdown with Danny, Matt and Sheelagh and wondered why her Auntie Bridie didn’t get off her behind and give a hand.

Lizzie marvelled that her mother seemed not even to hear the clamour around her, while Lizzie herself could hardly bear it. The German engines had a sort of intermittent burring sound that you’d hear sometimes between the almost incessant ack-ack guns peppering the night. But most terrifying of all was the shrill and whistle of the bombs, and the crash and boom of them landing that often seemed to shake the walls of the cellar.

Rose, sitting beside Bridie on the mattress, began suddenly to cry. Kathy put a cup of tea in her hands, but they shook so much Lizzie thought most of it would be spilt. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said to Kathy. ‘I tried to get to Mam’s, but I, I…’ She gave a shudder and said, ‘I was so scared.’

‘Hush,’ Kathy said, putting an arm around her. ‘You’ll wake the weans. You’re not alone; sure, we’re all bloody scared.’

‘Aye, but you don’t understand. I can’t do it,’ Rose cried. ‘I can’t get the three of them up and dressed and off in the middle of the night to Ma’s.’

Kathy was smitten with guilt. Of course she couldn’t. Lizzie and Danny were of an age to see to themselves a bit, and were even a help to Kathy, but Rose’s three were still wee. Why hadn’t she thought about it? Bridie could help, but Kathy knew it was no good asking her, and Maggie had her own little one to see to. ‘You need someone with you,’ she said. ‘What about our Carmel?’

Rose looked up with the deep-brown eyes her children had inherited, but hers seemed sunk in her head and ringed with black, and Kathy realised she was so thin her cheekbones stuck out. ‘Your ma said your Carmel’s gone a bit wild, she’s never in nights. She’d be just another to look after and worry about.’

‘Your sisters?’

‘They’re all away,’ Rose said. ‘Mammy sent them at the beginning of the holidays to our people in Ireland. There’s only Catrin, and she’s living in Lozell’s near her chap’s people.’

‘Mammy?’

‘She has enough on her plate with her worries about your da.’

‘What about him?’ Kathy said, alarmed.

‘With his chest playing up again.’

Mary had said nothing to Kathy, and for a moment she was a little upset that she’d confided in Rose, but that wasn’t the issue at the moment. She said suddenly and decisively, ‘You must come to us.’

‘How can she?’ Bridie put in, the first time she’d spoken in ages. ‘We have little enough room as it is.’

‘Well, what we have, we’ll share,’ Kathy snapped. To Rose she said, ‘You and the weans can bed down in my attic night-times. I’ll be on hand to help you then, and you can share the cellar.’

Rose’s eyes showed her gratitude, and yet she said, ‘I wanted to stay in my own place, you know, to have a nice home for Sean to come back to.’

Hitler might see you have no home at all, Kathy thought, but aloud she said, ‘Sure, you’ll be in your own home in the daytime, it’s only nights you’ll be here.’

Lizzie gave a yawn and suddenly realised how weary she was. Her eyelids felt heavy and she blinked to keep them open. Kathy and Rose were still talking softly, with a sharp rejoinder now and then from Bridie, but she was too tired to take it in. She leant sleepily against her mother, and Kathy smiled down at her. Her hands were full – one arm cradled Josie, thankfully asleep again, and the other was round the distressed Rose – but she saw the exhaustion in her daughter’s face. ‘Lie down for a wee while,’ she said. ‘You’ll be tired out tomorrow.’

Doubting she would sleep in the noise all about them, Lizzie crawled under the eiderdowns with her brother and cousins. Danny, Matt and Pete were fast asleep already at the other end, and Sheelagh stirred as Lizzie moved in between her and Nuala, but didn’t wake. The murmur of the women’s voices was comforting amid the din coming from above the cellar, Lizzie thought as she closed her eyes.

She slept deeply and didn’t wake, not even when the baby cried for a feed and Matt and Danny both needed the toilet and had to be stood on the draining board to wee in the big sink. Neither did a nearby explosion cause her to do little more than turn over. Kathy, lying on the other mattress, envied the slumber Lizzie was enjoying. Though her eyes felt gritty with tiredness, she knew she’d be unable to rest until the raid was over.

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