Birmingham Blitz (2 page)

Dad couldn’t make a fuss about him moving in because he had Lola there already, transforming Mom into one of the saints and martyrs even though I did most of the skivvying. He liked Len. Besides, he wasn’t the sort to make a fuss. Quiet man, my dad. He didn’t get up and bang on about anything much. Mom could’ve got away with murder, and often did. Emotional murder. Poison darts kept flying his way – ‘Victor, you’re useless, hopeless, no good to anyone . . .’

She made it quite clear to Eric and me that pregnancy and birth had been the greatest trials of her life and that to compensate her for the ordeal of bringing us into existence we had to bother her as little as we could manage. We’d been through the ploys of trying to get her attention by loudness, naughtiness and breaking things, and nothing had worked for long, so we had to learn to put up with it and shift for ourselves.

Mom had days sometimes when she couldn’t even seem to move herself, just sat in a chair staring at the walls. Life weighted her to the floor. She was literally bored stiff. Bored with my dad, my solid, reliable dad, who had not an ounce of lightness or fun in him but was all a husband and father should be – except whatever it was she wanted him to be. I know she never loved him – not even when they first got married. Lil always said Mom married him to keep up with her pal Stella.

When I used to hear them talking, Stella and Mom, about their lives, Mom’d say, ‘And then of course I went and married Victor.’ The way she said it it might as well have been, ‘And then I died.’

A lot of women didn’t expect more than they got, but she did. She was romantic and full of dreams. I reckon on those bad days, when her face was strung tight and her hair never came out of a scarf and she smoked and snapped and sighed all day, she was looking at her life those last twelve, thirteen, fourteen years and thinking, ‘What a waste.’

For Eric and me there was Nanny Rawson. She was always there and always, after a fashion, pleased to see us. When Mom sat listless in her chair and said, ‘Oh go out and do summat with yourselves,’ we’d often as not shoot up the Moseley Road to our nan’s, me holding Eric’s little hand to keep him off the horse road. Nanny Rawson’d give us a piece with jam if she had any and let us play out in the yard with the neighbour’s kids. We’d stay until it was nearly time for bed. When we got home, sometimes Mom had cooked for us. Sometimes she was still sitting in her chair, the same cup of cold tea balanced on the arm.

Course, all the family were at Lola’s funeral in their glory. Dad got back from his camp with the Territorials two days earlier. He joined the TA a year before, after the Munich crisis, which I suppose made him feel useful and got him out of the house one evening a week after a shift on the buses, and some weekends. Must have been restful for him. They were training him up as a signalman.

Life was barely worth living in our house the morning we buried Lola. Mom had given Dad hell ever since Lola passed on because he hadn’t been there.

‘I couldn’t help it, Doreen,’ he snapped at her finally. He must have been feeling guilty enough already. ‘But I had to go. The way things are there’s going to be a war – soon.’

‘There’s not going to be a war,’ Mom sneered. ‘They won’t let it happen.’ She looked suddenly frightened. ‘They won’t, will they?’

She’d been up since crack of dawn, a scarf round her curlers, cutting bread for sandwiches, eggs bobbling noisily in a pan of water. Good job it was only sandwiches because she wasn’t the world’s greatest cook. She got everything too dry or too wet and finished it off by burning it. Her rock cakes spread out into black coins of sponge, charred sultanas bulging out.

‘Who’s coming then?’ I asked.

Mom sniffed. ‘Don’t know for sure. But some of
them
’ll most likely turn up.’

‘Them’ were some of Dad’s long lost relatives, and she was going to show them what was what. Dad’s brothers and sisters were all scattered about, some in Birmingham, some wider still. We weren’t sure where and we never saw any of them. But Mom was determined that she was a cut above whoever might turn up so it was out with a tin of salmon and the house had to be spotless.

The coffin was in the front room taking up most of the space between the whatnot in the window with an aspidistra on the top in a brass pot, leaves snagging on the window nets, and the little china cabinet at the back end of the room. The chairs had been pushed to one side, and dead flies dusted out of the vases. Mom liked to keep the front room a bit special so we spent most of our time in the back round the table.

Thing about my mom was, she had dreams of everything all kippers and curtains out on one of the new estates. She’d say names like ‘Glebe Farm, Weoley Castle, Fox Hollies’ with a special look in her eye, sort of tasting them on her tongue. New houses with bathrooms and neat little gardens front and back. But she wouldn’t go. It wasn’t Dad stopping her. And we weren’t half as hard up as some of the neighbours. Balsall Heath, just a couple of miles south of the middle of Birmingham, may not have been her first choice, but she could at least feel she’d gone up in the world because she had a back and a front room and a patch of garden, and she had a set of willow pattern china off the Bull Ring when many a household in the street were still drinking out of jam jars. And in the end she needed another kind of security – she’d never move too far from her mom, Nanny Rawson, in her back-house in Highgate.

It was Nan who’d arranged everything for Lola: the plot in Lodge Hill Cemetery, registering the death, the hearse. Mom had one of her times of deciding she couldn’t cope. But she was the one in charge today, pinner over her nightdress, dispensing orders. The house filled up with shouting.

‘Doreen – I need a shirt collar . . .’ Dad didn’t tend to move when he needed anything, just sat tight and hoped it would appear.

‘Here!’ she hollered up the stairs from the back room. Could bawl like a fishwife she could, when she forgot she was trying to be respectable. She had a collar in one hand, loaf under the other arm, the top half buttered. ‘It’s starched.’ Course it was. I’m surprised she didn’t starch his underpants.

‘Genie – I want you out scrubbing the front step before you think about getting dressed up. Eric—’ thwack—‘get your hands off. Look – the table’s all smears now!’

‘I daint mean to,’ Eric snivelled, clutching his smarting ear.

‘Genie – just get him out of here. Keep out of my way. And Lenny, sit down, will you? You’re getting me all mithered. At least you’re ready – even if it is hours before time.’

Len launched himself backwards into a chair so the cushion would’ve groaned if it were capable. His clothes were too tight and none of us had had any breakfast, but Len still had the grin stuck on his face that had been there since Monday when he got his first ever job, aged twenty-nine. He was going to pack shells at the Austin works, travel out on the bus, the lot, and he was so pleased with himself he’d hardly been able to sit still since.

‘You’d best go in the garden for a bit,’ I advised Eric. ‘I’ve got to scrub the step.’

‘Can’t I come and watch you, Genie?’

‘All right. If you have to.’

I completed my chore in the morning sunlight, made hazier by all the smoke from the factory chimneys. The smell of manure rose from the horse road and there was a whiff in the air of something chemical. Eric stood leaning against the front wall, sniffing and idly scuffing his shoes against the brickwork.

‘You’d better pack that in,’ I said, ‘or you won’t half get it.’

Then I was allowed to get changed. I had one decent dress which Mom had knocked up on her old Vesta machine. First time she’d made me anything. It was a pale blue shirtwaister, and I wore it with a pair of white button-up shoes which were scuffed grey round the toe-tips and pinched at the sides, but I could at least still get them on. I felt awkward in that dress. That was partly because Mom had managed to get the waist too high. And I suppose I didn’t think of myself as a girl – not a proper one, like my friend Teresa, and other girls who liked to dress up. I was so skinny, Dad used to say, ‘We could use you as a pull-through for a rifle’ – elbows and knees sticking out and my socks would never stay up. I was supposed to be a woman by now, getting ‘bosoms’ and acting grown up. After all, I was out at work. But it was all a flaming nuisance, to my mind. Your monthly coming on, rags chafing in your knickers. I didn’t half wish I was a boy sometimes.

Downstairs in the back room I peeped in the oval mirror. My face looked back at me from the yellow glass, big grey eyes almost too big as my face was so thin and delicate, pointy nose, though not sticking out as far as Mom’s. My straight, straight brown hair was parted in the middle and hung thick over my shoulders. Auntie Lil used to say I was prettier than my mom. She may’ve said that just to rile Mom of course. I gave myself a smile which brought out my dimple, like a little pool by the right side of my mouth.

Dad emerged from the stairs and said, ‘You look a picture, Genie. Be nice to see you doll yourself up more often.’ I went pink. Dad seemed to be having trouble turning his head. Must’ve been the starch in that collar.

Mom’d been fussing on the way. ‘Victor, your tie’s not straight. Genie, you take Len into church and make sure he behaves himself. Eric, for pity’s sake stop sniffing.’ Poor Eric. Very snotty, my little brother. Whatever the time of year there was always a reservoir of green up his nose.

They were all waiting outside St Paul’s Church in their Sunday best, a line of desperately polished shoes, and coats even though it was the middle of summer, giving off a smell of mothballs. Nanny Rawson had on a navy straw hat and her mud-coloured coat which she’d bought off a lady second-hand, saying you could get away with brown on any occasion. She was a wide lady, walked rocking from foot to foot the way you might shift a full barrel of beer. She had an ulcer on her right leg so it was thickly bandaged, and round, muscular calves as if someone had dropped a couple of cricket balls down inside her legs. To match her hair she had a bit of a black moustache, which is more than my grandad had. Bald as a pig’s bladder he was. But of course he’d been dead ten years by 1939.

There were a group of four people in shabby clothes and down-at-heel shoes who I thought looked ever so old, and when Dad went to them, red in the face, sweat on his forehead, I realized these were some of the uncles and an auntie we never saw. He shook each of their hands or slapped their shoulders, said, ‘Awright are you?’ and couldn’t seem to think of anything else to say. Mom was looking down her nose at them, and they shifted about on their feet and looked embarrassed. I went and shook hands too, and one of the men looked nice and kissed me, and they said, ‘Hello Eugenie,’ the woman with a sarky note in her voice. I don’t think she was my proper auntie. She just married someone.

Lil was there with her kids. She had a wide black hat on with a brim which we’d never seen before. Mom sidled up to her nodding her head like a chicken at the hat. ‘Cashed in your pawn ticket in time, did you?’

Dad was saying, ‘
Doreen
,’ pulling her arm. ‘Remember who we’re burying today, please.’

‘I’m hardly likely to forget, Victor,’ brushing his hand off. ‘Since I was the one left to deal with it all while you were off playing soldiers.’

Dad’s cherub face was all pink now, his voice trembling. ‘How many times do I have to tell you, the Territorial Army does not play soldiers. Don’t you realize just how serious . . .’

Lil started putting her threepence ha’penny in too, her lovely face puckered with annoyance. In a stage whisper she started off, ‘Don’t forget, you stuck up cow, that some of us do a job of – Patsy!’ She broke into a yell, catching sight of him leaping gravestones like a goat. ‘Get here – now!’ That was our Lil for you. Scarcely ever got through a whole sentence without having to bawl out one of the kids.

‘Pack it in, the lot of you,’ Nan hissed at them. ‘They’re staring at us.’ She tilted the straw hat towards the aunt and uncles whose eyes were fixed on us. ‘Doreen – go in,’ Nan commanded, still through her teeth. ‘And see if you can keep your gob shut.’

‘Come along, Eric.’ Mom flounced off in her mauve and white frock, yanking Eric along in his huge short trousers which reached well below his knobbly knees.

Dad seemed flustered, not knowing who to sit with, and ended up following me in with Len. I took Len’s hand. ‘Come on – I’ll look after you.’

He came with me like a little kid. No one wanted to sit in the actual front row so we filed into the second lot of pews. Len’s knees were touching the back of the pew in front, his enormous thighs pressed against mine. It wasn’t that he was a fat man, he was just built on a huge scale. He kept looking round at me, pulling faces and grinning.

‘S’nice this, Genie, in’t it?’ I think he liked the candles and the coloured glass. He pointed to his fly buttons and said loudly, ‘What if I need to go?’

‘You just tell me,’ I whispered. ‘I’ll take you out. Try and keep your voice down, Len.’

He heard Cathleen, Lil’s three-year-old, laughing behind us, so he started laughing too – hor hor hor – hell of a noise, shoulders going up and down.

‘Len.’ I gripped his arm, nervously. ‘You’re not s’posed to be laughing. Lola’s in that coffin up there.’ I pointed at it, flowers on top, the lot.

‘In there?’ He pointed a massive finger.

I nodded. ‘She’s dead – remember?’

But that set him off even worse and I had to start getting cross and say, ‘Now Len, stop it. You mustn’t.’