My Daughter, My Mother (6 page)

She must have been hungry, though she wasn’t thinking about that until the door slowly opened and there was Mom, bent over, clinging to the door, a loaf under her arm. Catching a whiff of the fresh bread made the saliva gather in her mouth. Mom had her coat on, even though the morning was quite warm, and it hung on her, far too loose now.

Mom was scarcely more than a skeleton. Before she fell ill she had appeared careworn, older than her years. Now, at forty-two, Alice Winters looked like an old woman. She had been left a widow with three children, Margaret’s half-sister and half-brothers, Elsie, Edwin and Cyril, and had worked her fingers to the bone in factories, cleaning, taking in washing, anything to keep them out of the clutches of the parish. Those years had drained away her youthful looks.

Alice had never moved far, either. Born in Cregoe Street – an old district packed with factories and jerry-built houses, edged by wharves and railway tracks, and a stone’s throw from the middle of Birmingham – she’d ended up just round the corner in Upper Ridley Street. After those years struggling alone, Ted Winters, dark-eyed and stocky, had come along and wooed her. Ted was a widower with a son killed in the Great War, or so he said. Alice had had two more children with him in the 1930s: Tommy and Margaret. Hoping for rescue, for someone to share the load, Alice had found herself a man who looked sturdy and competent, who could turn on the charm all right, but who was in fact an idle boozer. He was out of work as much as in, and never lifted a finger to help her, even in her dying weeks.

‘Alice?’ Margaret heard a concerned voice from the yard. ‘Oh, bab, you shouldn’t be up and about like this! Oh my Lord, just look at the state of yer.’

It was Mrs Jennings from next door, a soft, rounded woman, swathed in a stained pinner, her pale-brown hair plaited and caught up roughly at the back and secured with kirby grips. She took Alice’s arm.

‘What on earth’ve you been doing? Have you been down the shops?’ Dora Jennings sounded appalled. ‘Come on – let’s get you in and looked after.’

Margaret watched. Mom seemed unable to move. She was bent over, air passing in and out of her in shallow gasps, the skin stretched over her knuckles as she clung to the door. She didn’t look the same any more. Her face was so pinched that her eyes and nose seemed to have grown and her cheekbones jutted, while the rest of her face had sunken in.

‘I can’t.’ Alice’s voice had gone high and reedy and it was almost a sob. ‘Give us a minute. Just leave me . . .’

‘Give me the bread – come on, take my arm.’ In a moment Dora Jennings managed to steer the sick woman inside. The downstairs of these houses, which opened onto a yard and backed onto another row of dwellings facing the street, consisted of only one room and a minute scullery. The range and the table took up most of the space, so it was only a couple of steps to get the poor woman, now a bag of bones, onto a chair. Alice sank down with a moan, her head in her hands, having to give all her strength to drawing breath.

‘I’ll make yer a cuppa tea: you need summat inside yer.’ Dora Jennings sounded severe because she was in a panic. ‘My goodness me, look at yer – and where’s that husband of yours? He wants stringing up, that he does!’ The sight of Alice Winters was a disturbing one. Her neighbour hurried out to the tap with the kettle and came back to stoke the range. ‘Where’ve you been, Alice, in heaven’s name?’

Mrs Jennings hadn’t noticed Margaret sitting there. Margaret watched as she pulled another chair close to her mother and gently clasped her bony hand.

Alice, lifting her head, managed to speak in between pauses for breath. ‘I had to go to Auntie’s – get summat for the little’uns. I took the blanket . . .’

‘Off your own bed?’ Dora Jennings was even more horrified. ‘And you’ve been all the way down there in your state, carrying it? Why in heaven’s name didn’t you send Margaret?’

Weak as she was, Alice had managed somehow to go out of the yard, make her halting way down the entry and along, leaning against the fronts of the houses every other step, to the pawnshop near the corner. After that she had gone to the bakery, even further along the street.

She was shaking her head. ‘No, I wanted . . .’ Weak sobs shook her body, which was almost too wasted to cry. Margaret saw Mrs Jennings’ face twist with a mixture of pity and horror. She stroked the almost transparent hand. ‘I had to do summat for ’em. Today . . . Be a mom to ’em. I’ll have to send them . . . It’ll be – the last time . . .’

Margaret, with the dream-like perceptions of a five-year-old, had made no sense of this at the time. None of it made sense until years later. She didn’t know that for days the lips of the adult world had been busy with the words ‘war’ and ‘evacuation’. Nor did she know yet that she was going to school today, even though it was Saturday. Her mother’s words made no sense, not then. But she did remember Mrs Jennings getting silently to her feet, tears in her kindly eyes, and going round to her mother, bending to embrace her, with Alice’s pinched face cradled against her chest.

Mom had told her to carry the little bundle with some of the bread in it and a nub of cheese.

‘You know what Tommy’s like,’ Mom whispered. Tommy was seven, big for his age and strong, but erratic. Alice couldn’t stop the tears coursing down her cheeks as she sat, buttoning up Margaret’s coat. ‘He’ll drop it or leave it somewhere. You be a big girl now and look after it. And put Peggy in your pocket. There’s a girl.’

Peggy, Margaret’s doll, was a rough little thing with brown wool hair and clothes made of scraps, sewn over a wooden peg. Her face had been put on with a blotchy fountain pen and was dreadfully smudged, but Margaret adored her.

And that was the last she remembered of her mother, taking the bundle from her that sunny morning, their rations for the journey tied up in a rag. Mrs Jennings appeared, having made them each a stera bottle – which had previously contained sterilized milk – full of sweet tea.

‘Don’t worry about your mother now,’ she told them. ‘I’ll make sure ’er’s all right. And, Tommy, you’re a big boy now. You must look after Margaret.’

Then Tommy was with her and they were at school, gas masks in boxes over their shoulders. The string chafed her and made her shoulder ache. After that came the train, with them all crowded into carriages.

The day was hot and very long, the longest she could ever remember. There was no corridor on the train. Margaret was squeezed in next to the window where the sun streamed in, making her face red and hot. Over the other side was Miss Peters, one of the teachers from the school. She was nervous, but kindly, trying to deal single-handed with a carriage full of thirty or so young children. There was pushing and shoving, teasing. One of the girls was sick and the carriage took on a nasty sour smell.

Now and then Miss Peters thrust her head out of the window to call desperately to the teacher in the next carriage. She got them singing ‘Ten Green Bottles’ and ‘Greensleeves’. The day grew hotter. What had seemed at first like an adventure became exhausting and bewildering.

Margaret dozed against Tommy’s shoulder until he nudged her awake.

‘Let’s ’ave a bit of that bread, Sis.’

Margaret looked up at him, so glad he was there. If Tommy was with her, everything would be all right. He was a big, handsome-looking boy with brown eyes like hers, but darker hair, like the Old Man’s. She knew Tommy would protect her. Tommy was seven and he had become very grown-up today. He’d said he wouldn’t let anyone hurt her. Even though he teased her at home, outside he was her protector, chasing other kids off when they started on about her eye.

They ate some of the bread and drank some tea. Soon an urgent feeling came on low down in Margaret’s body. She hoped it would go away, but it didn’t. She put her lips right up close to her brother’s ear.

‘I need to go, Tommy.’

She screwed up her face in misery as he looked down at her.

‘What: number twos? Yer
can’t
.’ He looked round wildly for a moment. There were no toilets. ‘You’ll ’ave to hold it in.’

‘I can’t,’ Margaret said, starting to cry.

Then for a few moments it went off and Tommy lost interest in her, assuming the problem was solved. But the feeling came back, more urgently. She waited, holding on until she couldn’t any longer. She felt herself let go into her knickers and then she was sitting on it, like warm pebbles, alien and uncomfortable. She wanted to cry, but she was terrified the other children would notice her.

Letting a few moments pass, she slid from the seat and squatted on the floor, her face pressed against the knee of another child who was standing up. There was so much going on in the crowded carriage that she hoped no one would notice. Slipping her finger into her knickers at the back, she hoped to empty them discreetly onto the floor.

She was almost sure of her success when a voice cried, ‘Phwoor! What’s that pong!’ It was one of the boys. ‘ ’Ere, look, uurgh! Old squiffy-eyes’s shat ’erself!’

Margaret’s mind seemed to have shut out all the details after that, except for the moment when every face in the carriage was turned to stare at her, Tommy’s included, and she knew that she stank and wouldn’t be able to clean her finger for the whole of the rest of the journey, and that of all the children there she was the most polluted. Miss Peters took over. Somehow, with the help of a newspaper, the offending mess was despatched out of the window. Everything settled. But the terrible swelling shame didn’t, or the stench of her finger with its stained nail all that day.

Then it was evening and they were all in a big place somewhere, with a floor of scuffed boards and chairs with sagging seats round the walls and a little stage. A gristly-looking man in a cap came and fetched Tommy, saying that he looked a strong lad. Margaret waited for Tommy to say, ‘My sister’s coming too.’ But Tommy got to his feet without a word and she saw that his face was set, the way it looked when he was trying not to cry. He looked very small next to the man, who led him away holding his shoulder. He glanced back, just for a second, looking frightened. And then he was gone.

The other children were collected in ones and twos. But Margaret was left in the gloomy village hall, cross-legged on the floor, clutching Peggy Doll in her pocket with her clean hand, rubbing her dirty finger round and round in a knot in the wood in front of her.

‘There’s just the little girl with the lazy eye,’ she heard someone say. There were two other teachers with Miss Peters. ‘She’s very young. We must get her a billet tonight somehow.’

A discussion ensued. Then she was walking with Miss Peters, surrounded by the strange smells of the fields and a whiff of wood smoke and soon afterwards, out of the darkness, a door opened, showing a room lit only by a hurricane lamp on the table, and she had her first sight of a yellow-eyed cat and of Mrs Nora Paige.

Eight

‘You’ll sleep down here,’ Mrs Paige said in her grating voice. An exhausted Miss Peters had disappeared off into the darkness after a brief introduction. ‘There’s no room for you upstairs – those rooms are mine and my Ernest’s, so I can’t go putting you up in a bed. Not even for ten and six a week.’

The cottage was a two-up, two-down. They had passed through a dark front parlour into the back room, which was dimly lit by the oil lamp. In the gloom Margaret could make out an iron range in the chimney alcove. A deal table took up much of the room and on it was a chaos of plates and books around the lamp. At the back, in front of the window, was the stiff, upright piece of furniture to which Mrs Paige was pointing. It had wooden arms, but on the seat lay some very firm-looking oblong cushions covered with dark material.

‘Here’s a blanket. If you need to do your business I’ve left a bucket there by the door. The privy’s outside for the daytime. And Seamus usually sleeps up here, so you won’t have to mind if he gets up with you.’

She eyed the cat, which was standing by a leg of the table, eyeing them back. He didn’t look friendly, Margaret thought. She wasn’t used to cats.

‘Now you lie down. I’m going to my bed.’

With no offer of food, drink or any word of comfort, she left, taking the oil lamp with her. The room melted into darkness. Margaret lay her aching body down on the hard settle with its lumpy horsehair cushions, too tired to care where she slept. She clutched Peggy Doll in one hand and pulled the blanket over her, which was made of a patchwork of knitted squares and gave off an aroma of mothballs.

There was a mix of other smells in the room: the bitter whiff of coal, which she was used to, mixed with a ripe, fruity scent, which she wasn’t. The next morning she saw that it came from a basket of cooking apples on the quarry tiles by the back door, fallers with bruises and wasp holes. Far away outside she heard a shriek, which must have been a bird. Her head was throbbing and her eyes already closing as she settled.

A second later something thumped down on her feet and she leapt up, whimpering with fear. It made a tiny mewing sound. The cat! She couldn’t see anything, but she didn’t like the memory of its staring yellow eyes and the feeling that it could see her when she could see nothing at all. For what seemed an age, she waited. Eventually she heard a rhythmic, purring noise from the cat, which sounded much more friendly and reassuring. She eased her weight down along the settle again until her feet, still in their dirty-white socks, met the creature’s soft body. She snatched her legs away again in a panic, but nothing happened. Drawn by the warmth, she let her feet slide back against the purring cat.

She thought of her mother: not the frail woman clinging to the door that morning, but Mom as she had been before, hard-pressed, but kindly and comforting. Then she thought of Tommy, of seeing him being led away by that rough-looking man – Tommy looking lost and frightened. She began to snuffle and cry.

‘Mom . . . want my mom . . . Want Tommy . . .’ But soon she was overcome by sleep.

Miss Peters came to fetch her the next morning. Margaret burst into tears at the sight of her. Mrs Paige had given her thin salty porridge and kept talking about something called the Other Side, while peeling apples at the table.