All The Days of My Life (2 page)

It must be like magic, like turning the pages of her book, going further and further into the picture of the lady in the long dress in the deep forest.

She must have fallen into that four-year-old's daze, awake but dreaming, for Mr Burns's angry voice came at her suddenly, as he shouted, “Look at this filthy mess –” and she realized suddenly that all the children had snapped to attention. She had even heard, at the back of her dream, Ian Brent plop down from the luggage rack like a ripe apple from a tree, and land, somehow, in his proper place in a sitting position. Now he sat stiffly, arms folded, eyes straight forward, in the position Mr Burns insisted they assume in the classroom. All the children had their arms folded and looked ahead of them. Cissie Messiter was straightbacked, but right on the edge of her seat; was trying, unobtrusively, to kick the newspapers into the narrow space underneath. Only Peggy Jones, beside her, had her head turned witlessly towards the corridor, where Mannie Frankel was holding the side of his head and crying.

Beside him Mr Burns, red-faced and sweating, went on shouting into the compartment, “I told all of you, before you got on this train, to behave yourselves. You're not in the slums now. You're going to a decent place, to meet a decent set of people, country people, not pigs, like all of you. If I catch you with your head out of the window once more, my lad,” he said, turning to the blubbering Mannie, “you won't have any head left to put out. Is that understood?”

Mannie, conditioned to expect that tone of voice to be followed by a blow, cried all the harder.

Mr Burns bent over him, took his ear in his hand, put his face ogreishly against the boy's and said again, “Understand?”

Mannie Frankel let out an earsplitting scream.

Mr Burns released him suddenly, so that he stumbled backwards.

All the children in the carriage, except Peggy, continued to stare straight ahead of them, not daring to meet each other's eyes. Mary's thumb, as she heard Mannie's walking run along the corridor of the moving train, moved up, slowly and steadily, from her lap into her mouth. She did not know what was going to happen. She felt very frightened. Mr Burns, sweating in his shiny black suit, his collar and tie, at the carriage door, might come in and make them all put out their hands and hit them with his long wooden ruler. He had broken a girl's finger once, her brother Jackie had told her. Just as bad was the loss of her magic dream, like getting a toffee and having Ivy snatch it away, unwrap it and put it in her own mouth. Great big red lips, yellow teeth, pink tongue sucking round her toffee.

“Take your thumb out of your mouth, Mary Waterhouse,” came the shouting voice. “You're not a baby now.” She took it out.

“As for the rest of you guttersnipes – get this carriage cleaned up. Ugh – it smells. Didn't your mothers give you a wash before you came?” And he disappeared.

“Ivy washed me,” Mary said into the rustling noise as the children collected newspapers from the floor. She was remembering the cloth, grey and part of an old shirt, which had gone wet and stale-smelling, round her neck and ears, before she set off for the school, where all the children, with paper bags or brown paper parcels containing their clothes, had mustered in the playground before leaving for the station. She remembered the way Ivy's chest, on a level with her own head, moved in and out in sharp jerks. She panted as she wiped. “Don't move your bloody head,” she had cried, as Mary turned away to avoid her breath. “Little madam,” she had muttered crossly, but Mary did not know exactly what she meant.

“I don't know what I'm supposed to do with all this lot,” said sharp-faced Cissie, standing up, clutching a heap of screwed up newspaper to her bony little chest. “Old Burns just thinks he's better than what we are. Just because he's a rotten schoolteacher. My mum says she remembers him coming to school with no boots on. She reckons he used to live down Wakefield Street and there were eight of them in the family. And they didn't have no blankets in the winter time,” she concluded triumphantly and stood there, peaky and small, in the middle of the jolting carriage, wearing a grey woollen skirt too long for her and a skimpy, faded blouse with flowers on it. “Here, Peggy,” she said. “Chuck these out the window.”

Peggy, who was still sitting down, stood up slowly and took the papers. The others watched her.

At the window she said, “I might get into trouble.”

Mary stood up and, standing on tiptoes, began to help her push the newspapers out. They were whisked off, down the side of the train. Peggy joined her at the window and laughed as the newspapers were half-torn from her grasp.

“Now come and sit down and behave yourself, Peggy,” ordered Cissie, the oldest child of a large family. Peggy, the slow-witted child, father unknown, of slow-witted Marge Jones, who lived over the stable in Meakin Street where old Tom Totteridge kept his horse and cart, did as she was told. She said, “I want my mum.”

“Oh, my Gawd,” said Cissie.

“CARELESS TALK COSTS LIVES,” Frank Jessop read, slowly and stonily, from the advertisement opposite him, above Mary's head.

The train went, for a long, dark time, through a tunnel. In the blackness, in the acrid stench of soot, Peggy began to cry. There was a thump in the corridor outside, and a cry of pain.

“It's all dark,” said Mary, frightened.

“It's a tunnel,” said Ian Brent. “I went through one before – on the way to the seaside.”

“Does it stop?” asked Cissie.

“Course it does. It's a tunnel, ain't it.” Nevertheless in the banging, snorting, pitch black carriage he was uncertain. “Here! What's that?” he cried in alarm as the thumping started again in the corridor.

“It's me,” came a voice, Mannie's. “I'm trying to get in. I can't find the door. Why's it gone all dark? Is it an air raid?”

“No,” said Ian. “Here – I'll stick my hand out the door. See if you can grab hold of it.”

They were blinded by sudden light. Ian Brent was there with his hand out. Cissie licked her lips. Mannie stood there in the carriage door, uncertain of his reception.

It was Peggy who half shouted, “Wetpants. Wetpants. Mannie is a wetpants,” but the others, whose fears had all been increased by the sudden and unexpected darkness, ignored her. They were in no mood, now, to turn on each other.

Win Hodges, who had been up the best part of the night, doing her own and her brother's washing, slept on in the corner, pale as a cellar mushroom.

“When will we be there?” Cissie asked Ian Brent. An only child, with a father who worked for the Gas Board and a mother sewing part-time in a bakery, he had been away on trains twice before.

“Search me,” he said. “Must be getting on for teatime now.”

Mary, still blinking a little, went back to looking out of the window. The train drew them through a big pinewood. The great eye of the sun hovered over the points of the trees. Looking down deep into the darkness of the branches, Mary remembered, again, her one book and the picture of the two children holding hands amid the long, dark trunks of the trees, at night.

“Oh – it's about two kids, whose Mum and Dad couldn't feed them no more, so they took them out in the woods and lost them on purpose like so they couldn't find their own way home,” Ivy had told her negligently. As she remembered that, Mary's mouth opened. The trees, their tops gleaming with sunshine, which had so charmed her, now made her feel scared. Her eyes filled and brimmed over. Tears began to roll down her chubby cheeks.

“What's up, Mary?” said Frank Jessop.

Mary, remembering more of Ivy's words, “– then they come to a witch's house and she tried to eat them up –” and seeing Ivy's blonde hair streaming down from under a steeple-crowned hat, gave a deep, gasping sob, like a howl.

“Cheer up, Mary. It'll be all right,” said Frank. “It's fer yer own good. You can 'ave an egg every day. You can go home when we've beat the Germans.”

This did not comfort Mary, who felt she did not want to go home. There, on the one side, was the picture, just like a photograph, of Sid and Ivy standing outside the narrow brick house in Meakin Street, and on the other the picture in the book, showing herself and her brother Jackie abandoned and wandering in the dark forest at night. Lost between the two visions, she went on crying. Gradually, under cover of the sobs, her natural optimism asserted itself. Jackie would always look after her. He always did. Nothing bad ever happened to Jackie. The forest must have an edge. They could walk out of it, away, into the fields beyond. And, just then, the trees gave way to an expanse of fern-covered common land, vast, green, fenceless, hedgeless, intersected by small trodden pathways through the high ferns and gorse, all warmed and lit by the golden light of afternoon, as far as the pastureland, which rose in gentle hills on the horizon. And Mary,
rubbing her two grubby hands over her wet cheeks, wiping her nose on her bare arm, ceased to sob.

“When we've beat the Germans –” Frank had said. The children's voices muttered on in the hot carriage. They were tired now.

“Dunno when that will be.”

“My dad,” Jim Hodges said stolidly, “reckons we'll lose.”

“What?” Mannie Frankel said, looking frightened: “Why? Why'll we lose?”

“My dad says,” Jim Hodges told him, “they've got more men, and more equipment than what we've got. He says anyone can see we're being beaten to a jelly. They're on the doorstep, he says, my dad says –” and he paused. “He says Mr Churchill's a liar.”

“Cor,” said Cissie. “What a rotten thing to say. Your dad's a rotten German spy.”

“His friend thinks so, too,” said Jim. “They know Winnie's got a plane waiting for him out in the country somewhere, and when the Germans come he'll drive out there in his car and go all the way to America.”

Cissie, looking out into the countryside, involuntarily searching for the plane, muttered, “I don't believe yer.”

“That's right, isn't it, Win?” Jim said. He reached out and jerked her knee about. “Wake up, Win. Doesn't our dad know Winston Churchill's got a plane somewhere so he can escape when we lose the war? Here, Win, doesn't our dad say that?”

Win, waking up, said, “Oh yer. That's what he says. What do you want to wake me up for? I'm tired.”

“So you could tell them it was true, what I said,” Jim said sensibly. “You can go back to sleep now.” And she did. “There – see,” he said to the others, “that's what my dad says. He doesn't care who wins the war.”

“He must be stupid,” said Frank Jessop.

“Don't you call my dad stupid,” Jim said. “He reckons we'd all be no worse off under the Germans than what we'd be under Churchill. He shoots the workers.”

“No worse off with Germans –” said Mannie. “Speak for yourself, then. Me and my mum and dad would be worse off, that's for sure.”

“Oh – Jews,” said Jim. “That's different. My dad don't care about the Jews. He says there's too many of them anyway, and they've got all the money. My dad's thinking about the working classes.”

“Who are they?” asked Mary, but no one heard her.

“They'd shoot the King,” said Cissie, scratching her head. “'Ere, I hope there's no little strangers in the backs of these seats. My head don't half itch.”

“They do them over every day with a brush,” Ian Brent said. “I know –I seen them. Anythink in your head you must have picked up at home.”

“Liar,” said Cissie, but without energy. Most of the children, hot, tired and hungry, were losing heart.

“I hope I get on a farm,” Jim Hodges said placidly. “I wouldn't half like to see the animals.”

“What animals?” said Mary.

“Sheep and cows,” said Jim. “That sort of thing.”

“I hope the bull gets you, Jim Hodges,” said Cissie in a murmur.

“Chickens,” said Frank Jessop, leaning excitedly towards Mary. “You know – oh, you know, Mary, they lay eggs and that.”

“Lay eggs,” said Mary. “What – eggs?”

“Yeah, 'course. What you eat.”

Mary had an egg every day. Ivy did not, nor did Sid, nor Jackie.

“Don't you tell nobody about these eggs,” Ivy had instructed her, with her face close to Mary's, for emphasis. “If I get to hear you've said one word – one word, mind – I'll lock you in the coal-hole and I won't never let you out. Are you listening?”

So Mary, with the mystery of eggs growing deeper but still inextricably bound up somehow with getting locked up, said, “Oh,” and no more. To change the subject she asked Frank, “Is this the country?”

“Course it is,” said Frank.

“Don't they have air raids here?”

“Course they don't. Why do you think we come here?” said Frank. “'Ullo – there's Jackie. Wotcher, Jack.”

Mary's brother leaned against the side of the door, surveying the seated children. “Wotcher,” he said. “Everybody happy?”

“Get out of it,” said Ian Brent scornfully.

“Thought I'd just pop in to see what you lot was doing,” said Jackie. “I told him I wanted to go to the toilet.”

“Who? Burns?” said Cissie. “You in with 'im?”

“Yer,” said Jackie. “'E give me one of 'is sandwiches, dinnertime.”

“
Never
” said Ian Brent. “What was in 'em?”

“Paste,” said Jackie. “You all right, Mare? You been crying, ain't yer? Your face is all dirty. Cor, you don't 'alf look a sight. Cheer up, gel, we'll be there in 'alf an hour.”

“I think it was that tunnel,” said Cissie. “I reckon she's too young to come away on her own, like.”

“Well, she's got me, ain't she?” said Jackie. “Stands to reason – our mum knows no 'arm will come to old Mary while brother Jack's about. That's right, ain't it, Mare?”