Birmingham Blitz (3 page)

Along our pew Mom was frowning across at Eric for pulling snot up his nose too loudly. Then there was a bawl from behind. Cathleen must’ve pulled Tom’s hair and made him whimper and Lil had smacked him one low down on the leg hoping no one’d see. He blarted even louder and Cathleen was grinning away to herself under those angelic blond curls, the mardy little cow. Nanny Rawson, next to the aisle in our pew, swivelled round and gave them all the eye from under that hat.

A train rattled past at the back of the church. At last the Reverend started in on his prayers. ‘We brought nothing into this world and it is certain we carry nothing out . . .’

I started to feel sorry for old Lola now I couldn’t smell her. Dad was a bit upset and blew his nose a lot. He’d tried to do his best for her. After all, she was his mom, even if she was a miserable old bitch. He was forever telling us it was just her age. She wasn’t always like that. Mom’d say, ‘Oh yes she flaming well was.’

But I sat there and thought what a rotten life she must’ve had. Terrible poverty they lived in when her kids were small. A slum house, not even attic-high, two up, one down on the yard, with nine children in the house and never enough to go round. Didn’t make her a kind person. Her husband did his best, from what Dad said, but he was a bit of a waster. My father was her little ray of sunshine. Bright at school and had always held down a job. The other kids drifted away and mostly stayed away.

I looked across at the coffin as we stood up and started in on ‘Abide With Me’. I thought about her old wasted body in there. How she’d climb out of bed very quick and pull her clothes up to sit on the chamber pot. Sometimes I’d get a glimpse of something hanging down there, like an egg, white and glistening. She’d sit for an age, grunting and cursing, willing urine to flow the way you will a late train to come. Sometimes she’d put her hand up her, try and push it back and relieve herself, and she’d give a moan. Soon as she lay down again it’d all come in a rush and I’d be clinging to the edge of the mattress trying to keep as far from her as I could, almost crying at the smell.

Poor old Lola. Thank God she’d gone.

‘I hope they don’t notice I’ve eked the salmon out with milk,’ Mom whispered, stirring the teapot in the kitchen at the back. ‘Here, take these through, will you Genie?’

I carried the sandwiches to the front room, Mom’s willing slave as ever. Willing because I’d have done anything for her if only she’d be glad I existed. She was being quite pally-pally with me today because she needed my help.

Everyone was crushed into the front room except Lil, who’d taken the kids out to let off steam in the garden. Eric and Little Patsy, a year his junior, were brawling on the grass like puppies.

It went all right, just about. Dad’s brothers and sister were either silent or very very jolly and the uncles loosened their threadbare ties, asked each other for a light and stood about smoking and sweating. There wasn’t the room to sit down. The auntie spent a lot of time peering in Mom’s china cabinet. They ate all they could and went out saying, ‘We’ll have to do this again,’ but all knowing the truth was that it’d be at the next funeral, and departed even more awkward than when they arrived.

So that left our family with the curling egg sandwiches and nubs of Madeira cake to get on in our usual affectionate way. I stuck with Len and brought him more helpings of food because he could eat for ever, his mouth churning away like a mincer.

Lil had brought the kids back in. She was a stunner, our Lil, and like a flypaper to men. Like Nanny Rawson she looked as though she had a touch of the tar-brush: she had tresses of black hair, almond-shaped brown eyes and olive skin, and today she’d got a dab of colour on her lips. Before she had the kids she sometimes used to put curl papers in her hair, and it hung in shiny black snakes down her back. Wild as the wind she was then, all high heels and make up. She worked as a french polisher in a toy factory, on gun handles and little carpet sweepers.

Mom’d always been jealous of her. Lil’s looks of course, for a start, even though she was worn to the bone nowadays with the kids. Lil was chosen as the May Queen when they were kids at school and Mom’s never forgiven her for that. But I think another part of her jealousy was Lil moving back in with our nan after her husband died. Well, I say died. Patrick Heaney was his name. Cheerful Big Patsy. Mom never liked him. Doesn’t like the Irish full stop, and his other crime was to make Lil happy. Patsy got into a fight one night – more of a friendly by all accounts – but the other bloke knocked him over on the kerb and he had a nasty bang on the head. He was never the same after. Turned to the booze, had fits, couldn’t get out of bed of a morning. Next thing was they were dragging him out of the canal. It was a shame. Lil was in pieces. But at least while he was alive she really had something with Big Patsy that Mom’d never had. You could see it in their eyes. She’d sit in his lap, even after Little Patsy was born. Popped out a couple of kids in as many years.

But she couldn’t cope on her own, what with holding down a job and the kids and their third child Cathleen being only a titty-babby. Poor Lil.

Cathleen sat on Lil’s lap and started pulling at her waves of black hair.

‘Leave off, will you?’ Lil snapped. ‘Never get a second to yourself with kids, do you? Can’t even fart in peace.’

‘Give ’er ’ere,’ Nan said. She took the little girl on to her enormous lap and bounced her until she squealed.

Lil sat back, tired as usual. Her mouth turned down more nowadays. ‘How about another cuppa tea, Dor, now that lot’ve gone?’

‘You know where the kettle is,’ Mom said with her usual charm.

‘I’ll get it.’ I went to the kitchen and made tea, not that I expected any thanks for it, and when I got back they were arguing. Mom and Lil that is. Len was shuffling a pack of cards. He never played anything, just shuffled. He and Dad usually just sat waiting for the wenches to burn themselves out.

Our nan had a look in her eye I didn’t quite like. She was sat forward. Cathleen had got down and was on the floor waving her legs in the air, showing off her bloomers.

‘Because,’ Nan was saying, ‘it’s the practice run Sat’dy, ain’t it?’

‘I’m not sending my kids nowhere,’ Lil said, scraping at egg on Tom’s face with her nails. ‘Whatever Adolf bloody Hitler’s planning.’

Hitler this, Hitler that, all we ever heard nowadays. I put the tray down, pushing plates aside. Everyone was keyed up about the thought of war war war.

‘Your mom’ll need you at ’ome,’ Nanny Rawson said to me. ‘You can look after your dad.’

‘Why?’ Lil looked at Mom. In a nasty tone she demanded, ‘Where’re you off to then?’

‘With Eric.’

Eric looked from one to the other of them, mouth full of cake and a hopeless expression on his face. He knew he wasn’t going to get a say.

‘You mean you’re sending him? To live with complete strangers?’ Lil was on her high horse. She caught hold of Cathleen and cuddled her tight, doing her best impression of the Virgin Mary.

‘That’s what we’re supposed to be doing, isn’t it? Or d’you want your kids bombed and gassed like they say they will be?’

‘But just sending him off . . . Poor little thing.’ Eric looked about as depressed as anyone would be faced with the choice of bombing and gassing or being sent away to live heaven only knew where. ‘Anyhow,’ Lil said. ‘You don’t need to go to the practice. Not as if you’re going with him, is it?’

Mom was silent for a split second. Everyone stared at her. She stuck her chin out. ‘I thought I’d go.’

Dad sat up then. News to him, obviously. ‘But Doreen . . .’

Nan was scandalized. ‘You mean go off – leave Victor and Genie?’

‘Not for good. I thought I could just deliver him. Have a look over where he’s going.’

‘But you’re not allowed,’ Lil argued. ‘I’d be allowed to go, with Cathleen so young, but you’re not – not unless you’re a helper or you’re . . .’ Lil looked ever so suspicious all of a sudden.

Mom stared back at her, brazen, nose in the air.

‘You’re never going to tell them . . .’ Lil started laughing a real nasty laugh. ‘Oh I get it. Well it wouldn’t be the first time, would it? After all, you were “expecting” when you got Victor to marry you, weren’t you? Longest pregnancy on record that one. What was it? Fifteen months?’

Dad had gone nearly purple in the face, to the roots of his hair. Mom stabbed her knife into the last piece of Madeira cake as if she wanted to kill something. ‘You bloody little bitch.’ I thought she was going to slap Lil but Nanny Rawson was on her feet pushing them apart.

‘That’s enough from the pair of you.’ She stood with her arms outstretched between them.

‘She only said she was pregnant so she could beat Stella to the altar!’

‘Well at least I’ve still got a husband – I’m not dragging my kids up in the slums.’

‘But you don’t give a monkey’s about sending Eric off to live with Christ only knows who . . .’

‘That’s why I’m saying I’m expecting you silly cow – so I can get on the train with him . . .’

I went and sat by Eric, who no one seemed to have given a moment’s thought to.

‘Take no notice,’ I said, putting my arm round him.

‘Is she going to send me away?’ He had tears in his eyes. ‘Where am I going?’

‘Somewhere nice I expect. In the country. See the cows and sheep. It’ll be all right,’ I told him, though I hadn’t the foggiest whether it would or not. ‘Here – want a game of snap?’

Eric nodded, picture of misery.

‘Right, now sit yourselves down,’ our Nan was saying. ‘As a mark of respect to Lola, since we ’aven’t seen much of that yet, we’ll ’ave a song.’

‘I’m not singing with her,’ Mom said.

‘That’s what you think.’ Nan got her squeeze box out from the corner and sat with it on her lap, legs apart, skirt pulling tight across her knees.

‘She’s wearing red bloomers,’ Eric whispered to me, distracted for a moment.

‘Doreen, Lil, stand up. You sing along too, Len,’ Nan urged him.

I got the cards off Len and played with Eric, and Dad sighed with relief that they’d all stopped carrying on and the two loving sisters started on a song. Nan was fantastic on the accordion. She’d picked it up off her dad and she could play the piano too. Just about anything you asked in the way of songs. A gift that, that ran in the family until it got to me, apparently. Mom could have a go too, given the chance. She, Lil and Nanny Rawson all had good strong voices. People called them the Andrews Sisters, and they did a turn in the pub now and again. Times when they sang were mostly the only occasions when they weren’t arguing.

So they stood in our front room with the sunlight fading outside and Dad lighting one fag after another to calm his nerves. They sang ‘The Rose of Picardy’ and ‘Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay’, blending their voices, and then that new song, ‘The Lambeth Walk’ everyone was mad about. Lil looked so pretty and not tired suddenly, Nan’s face was softer than usual and Len was swaying from side to side in his chair, face split by a smile, in heaven.

Mom looked almost happy while the music was going on. I saw Dad watching her and there were tears in his eyes. Shook me a bit, that. I wondered whether he was thinking about Lola, or about the fact that he might soon have to go away, or whether he was wondering the same as I was: why Mom couldn’t find it in her to be happier with him – with all of us.

Come the end of that week we were in for a surprise. I was working in a pawn shop in Highgate, which disgusted Mom, but it was one of the best jobs I’d had so far. That week, as we stood in the little shop on the Moseley Road, we watched a crowd filling sandbags to shore up the factories opposite. Every day there were changes. That Friday I walked home after work and saw the last evening rays catching the bloated shape of a barrage balloon, a silky light coming from it. Some people, Mom among them, were still saying, ‘Oh there’s not going to be a war.’ But if there was to be no war, what was all this for? Digging trenches in the parks, blackout curtains downstairs, and sending the kids away.

We’d had the gas masks months. One day when I got home Mom’d said in a grim voice, ‘Look what’s arrived.’ There was a pile of boxes by the door. The masks were most off-putting. They looked a bit of a joke with their mouse faces until you put one on. When I pulled it over my face it was so tight, and the smell of rubber made you heave. The leaflets told us there’d be wardens round with rattles if we had a gas attack.

‘I couldn’t wear that,’ Mom said, shuddering. ‘Make me sick that would.’

Dad, standing in shirtsleeves at the door, remarked, ‘I don’t s’pose being gassed’d make you feel all that marvellous neither.’

I didn’t really understand about war. Everyone was forever on about ‘the Last One’ but I wasn’t born till nearly six years after it finished. All I knew was that everyone was living on their nerves. Mom was on at Dad because he might have to go away. ‘What did you have to go and join the TA for? Other men of your age aren’t being called up. How d’you think I’m going to manage without you here?’ she’d wail. Tears turned on as well. There was a feeling about, excited and deadly serious at the same time, building up like the tension in a dog waiting to spring.

When I walked through the front door that evening I knew something was different. It was quiet, much more so than usual, but I could hear a voice in the back room. A man’s voice. Posh. I didn’t know who it was. I pushed the door open and before I’d had a chance even to open my mouth they all said, ‘Ssssh!’ without even looking at me. There they were, all sat round the table: Mom, Dad, Eric, Len. And in the middle of the table, shiny and new and absolutely gorgeous, there she was.