Orphan of Angel Street (17 page)

‘Oh Frank. Oh God, my little Frankie. I can’t even give ’im a decent burial.’

Soon after, in a corner of the yard up by the brewhouse wall appeared a cross about a foot high made from two pieces of smooth wood nailed together. Above it, a Union Jack was tacked to the wall.

‘What’s all that?’ Mercy asked coming in from work. Under the flag lay a bunch of white lilies.

‘It’s Elsie’s,’ Susan said. ‘For Frank. She’s bin out there ’alf the day. I ’ope she’s awright – seems to be acting a bit funny to me.’

Mabel peered out at the little home-made shrine across the yard. ‘Nah,’ she said with authority. ‘It’s natural enough. She wants to do summat for ’im.’

There were similar little offerings to be seen out on the streets, rolls of honour, flags and flowers for dead sons, fathers, brothers.

Elsie got into the habit of standing for a few moments in front of hers almost every time she passed it, going about her chores. The day after she’d laid her little memorial to Frank and was standing before it, her body one endless ache of sorrow, she heard someone else come up from behind and stand by her. Then Mabel stepped forward, laid another bunch of flowers close by the others and stood straight again, wiping her hands on her apron. Neither woman spoke, nor did they look at each other.

*

Tom and Johnny came home on leave for the first time in November, striding in large as life one wet midday. Elsie fell on them both, drawing them tight into her arms.

‘Mom!’ Johnny struggled as she kissed his face. ‘Go easy – you’ll squeeze all the breath out of us!’ He shook her off, embarrassed. Tom kept one hand on his mom’s shoulder, silently offering comfort, not knowing what to say about Frank.

‘You’re both bigger!’ Elsie cried, wiping her eyes. ‘Oh my God, look at the pair of yer!’ They seemed enormous suddenly in her tiny house. ‘Wait ’til yer dad sees yer! ’Ere – you hungry?’

‘When aren’t we?’ Tom said. ‘We could do with some decent grub, I can tell yer.’

Elsie smiled with a mixture of pride and sorrow as her two strapping, now much more muscular sons swung their kitbags on to the sofa and settled themselves at the table. She scurried around preparing food to hide the tears that kept welling up. Tom looked so like Frank now. Cross with herself she wiped her eyes. Enough of this – she had the twins home for a whole week. There’d be time aplenty to dwell on sorrow.

The two of them tucked in, munching like a couple of bulls, Elsie thought fondly. She’d bought all the food they could possibly afford.

‘Rosalie’s crazy to see yer,’ she told them. ‘She’s taken it ever so bad over . . .’ Everything seemed to lead to it. Frank dead, gone. She was weeping, hadn’t meant to . . .

‘Eh, Mom!’ Tom was up, an arm round her shoulders, struggling to control his own emotion. He’d been close to Frank, looked up to him. Both boys did their best to jolly her out of her crying.

‘We’ll take you out and about now we’re ’ome,’ Johnny said. ‘Give you a break. Don’t you cry, Mom. Us two’ll look after each other when we get out there. We’ll be all right, we will.’

‘I’m awright . . .’ Elsie forced a smile, pushing them down in front of their plates again. ‘It’ll be cold else. There’s more spud.’ She scraped round the pan. ‘Come on – let’s try and be cheerful.’

After a few moments Tom asked, ever so casually, ‘’Ow’s Mercy?’

A twinkle appeared in Elsie eyes. ‘Why – who’s asking?’

He’d written to her from the training camp three times since he’d been away. Pictured her in his mind coming home, finding his letter . . . Reading it with a smile on her face. Every night, lying on the hard ground in his tent it was Mercy who filled his mind. Her often solemn little face breaking into a smile for him, her teeth, small and slightly uneven which made the smile special for him. Made her Mercy. But she was still awesome to him now she was grown up. He thought of her startling pale hair, pale neck curving down into a lace collar. He’d started following that curve further in his mind, imagining how she might look. Smooth, very white, except for those two round . . . Tom remembered seeing his mom suckling Rosalie, her breasts huge with milk. He couldn’t stop thinking of the tender, swelling shapes under Mercy’s blouse. He was certain he was always the last in his tent to get to sleep, dreaming about her.

Trouble was, when it came to writing to her, he couldn’t begin to tell her what he was feeling so his letters ended up rather short, just telling her snippets about his training.

‘You should’ve seen us first time on parade – the sarnt said we was like lambs to the slaughter!’ – ‘Got our uniforms at last – now we feel like proper soldier boys . . .’

He always told her how Johnny was, asked about Susan and for Mercy to look out for his mom – he said this twice in the letter after Frank was killed. At the very end he’d tried to think how to say what he felt, something soft for his girl. In the third letter he found courage and wrote, ‘. . .
thinking of you always, night and day. Love Tom.
’

Mercy read these letters with a complete sense of wonder. She’d never received a letter before.

‘Who’s it from?’ Susan wheeled herself over eagerly when the first one arrived.

‘’Er – Tom,’ Mercy muttered, pushing it into the pocket of her dress.

‘Well let’s see then!’

‘Later – I’m in a rush.’

‘Well why can’t you leave it?’

‘It’s addressed to me, that’s why.’

She read the letter on the bus to work, so absorbed that she almost missed the stop.

‘Got summat worth ’aving there, ’ave yer?’ a woman teased as she rushed to leap off at the last moment, holding her hat on against the breeze outside.

The letter was strange, she thought. She had no clue what to expect from a letter. Was this a love letter, this little note telling her about a makeshift army training camp? The one spare word ‘love’ at the end. Was that it? Yet she was stirred up by it, by its very existence. Her man was writing to her. Her Tom! She was learning to think of him differently, not just as a playmate and the lad next door. And while she was a bit ashamed of wanting to keep her feelings secret, she couldn’t share this with Susan. This was hers and hers alone. She wrote him brief, affectionate notes in reply.

The day she knew the twins were coming home she could think of nothing but Tom.

‘You with us today, Mercy?’ one of the other girls in the factory teased her over the racket of the machines. ‘I’ve asked yer twice already!’

Mercy blushed and there were some ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ from round her.

‘What’s on ’er mind, I wonder!’

‘Nowt any of your business,’ Mercy replied with a mysterious smile which only brought on more catcalls and speculation. She took it all good-naturedly and sank back into her day-dreams. What else was there to think of standing in a factory day after day?

She didn’t see him waiting as she walked up the entry in the drizzle, her boots rapping a smart clip-clip on the damp pavement. She was dressed in a calf-length grey coat, the collar turned up, and a navy hat with a narrow brim under which her hair was just visible. Her cheeks were pink from the cold.

She caught sight of him and her step faltered. He was there, waiting! He looked broader, more of a man than before. He smiled, with warmth, but shyly. This was all new. They were no longer just childhood friends. Her heart was beating fast. Suddenly she was all nerves.

‘Tom,’ she said softly. In those seconds, like Elsie she saw Frank’s face in Tom’s, felt how terrible this war was. But mixed with this, the delicious, warming sense of knowing he had waited for her, had special feelings just for her.

He walked the last few steps to meet her and they stood in the entry, both with a silver veil of water droplets on their clothes.

‘How are you?’ she said. Seeing his nervous, solemn face, and out of her own giddiness she started laughing. ‘Blimey, you’re about twice the size you were three months ago!’

Tom laughed as well and the ice was broken, but Mercy felt she was seeing him for the first time, as if through a new, clear lens: everything about him, his brown eyes, shorn brown hair, the shape of his neck, his jaw.

‘You look different too,’ he said. ‘More grown up.’

‘Where’s Johnny?’ She was about to step into the yard when he caught her arm.

‘Mercy – can we spend a bit of time on our own like, this week, without Johnny and—?’ He nodded his head towards Mabel’s house.

‘Susan?’ Mercy looked guiltily at him. Susan hadn’t seen his letters, was prickly about Mercy’s secrecy. But Mercy suddenly, desperately didn’t want to spend her life feeling guilty because Susan couldn’t walk. She wanted to get out, to get some life of her own.

‘Come to the pictures – tomorrow?’

Mercy hesitated. It wasn’t going to be easy. ‘What’ll you tell Johnny?’

‘I’ll just tell ’im. ’E won’t mind.’

‘OK.’ She smiled, bubbling with excitement. ‘I’d love to go.’

Tom swooped forward and kissed her cheek. ‘I’ve missed yer.’

So it was real, she thought, touching her cheek. She’d almost wondered if she’d imagined what he said the morning he left, despite the letters. Heart thudding, and with an enormous sense of wonder she said, ‘I missed you too.’

‘I’m going to the Electric Cinema with Tom,’ Mercy announced defiantly to Mabel and Susan, expecting opposition.

Mabel opened her mouth and closed it again, unable to think of a good enough objection. She knew if she just said, ‘You’re not,’ Mercy would take no notice anyway. She’d done a lot of biting her lip over the past year and it was becoming a habit. It was paying her to keep quiet. Mercy was the main wage earner after all.

Susan looked up from laying crocks for tea. ‘What?’ she faltered. ‘Just you and ’im – on your own?’

‘Well – yes.’ Mercy, seeing the hurt in Susan’s eyes, couldn’t keep up her tough act any longer and bent down so she was level with her. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’

Susan put a plate down, concentrating on it very hard all of a sudden. ‘No – you go and ’ave a nice time.’ She sounded very subdued, near to tears.

They ate thin stew and beans in silence. Susan kept her eyes on her food. Mercy was all knotted up inside and kept glancing across at her. She was sorry, but she wasn’t going to go back on it. She desperately wanted to be with Tom.

‘I’m going in to give Mary a hand with Percy and Paul in a bit,’ Mabel said, laying down her fork.

‘Oh.’ Susan’s voice was bleak.

‘You can come too. Paul’d like to see yer, you know that.’

*

As it turned out Mercy went out with Tom that day and almost every other of his week’s leave. Johnny, not to be outdone, was walking out with a girl called Violet up the street and one evening they all went out together.

Watching the twins, Mercy saw that they’d both changed. They were both bolder, more manly. But while with Tom this new found confidence made him less awkward but no less kind, she found her feelings for Johnny changing for the worse.

He’s getting to be a right cocky sod, she thought, watching him and Violet walking along in front of Tom. He was bossy with Violet, his arm round her, pulling her here and there as if he owned her.

‘Let’s just go on our own tomorrow,’ she murmured to Tom, and he nodded.

‘That’s OK with me.’

They saw the new Chaplin film, went to the Bull Ring and ate cockles and roasted chestnuts by the illuminated stalls, stamping their feet and cupping the hot chestnuts in their hands to keep warm. Sometimes they walked the streets between high factory walls, or the closed shops on New Street or Corporation Street, Tom shyly taking Mercy’s arm, both laughing a lot, new jokes along with shared laughter from the past.

Mercy was intoxicated with happiness.

‘You awright?’ Tom asked her. ‘You don’t want to take cold.’

‘Ooh yes! I could stay out all night, I don’t care!’ she told him. She loved the warm feeling it gave her walking out with Tom. He felt a very solid presence beside her, not wild and skittish as Johnny now seemed. She trusted Tom – more than trusted him. She knew she had learned to love him for his kindness and devotion.

When they’d spent two evenings together he found the courage to draw her close into his arms and slowly, tentatively at first, they kissed in the foggy darkness, conscious of nothing but each other.

‘I love you so much, Mercy. I’ve always loved you, d’you know that? Ever since you belted that girl one for talking nasty to Susan, d’you remember? You’re like a beautiful little tiger, you are.’

Mercy laughed, blushing with pleasure. ‘You want to watch it then, don’t yer?’ She joked, making growling noises.

‘D’yer love me, Mercy?’

‘’Course I do.’

He took her hand and they sauntered down the street, in no hurry to get home.

‘I’ve never had anyone before,’ Mercy said suddenly. ‘Not to call my own. You’ve made me so happy, Tom.’

‘I know you haven’t.’ The thought made him feel so protective. ‘We’ll be together and I’ll look after yer. I promise yer that.’

Tom and Johnny had schemed to take Elsie out and about while they were at home but the weather was so wet they were more or less stuck at home.

‘Next time we’ll go out – up the Lickeys or somewhere,’ Johnny said to her. He was full of the joys, had been out to a boxing match with his dad like two pals together.

‘I don’t mind whether we go out or not so long as you’re ’ere and I know you’re safe,’ Elsie said.

The last evening they were all there in the gaslit room, Josephine heavily pregnant and fat in the face, Cathleen much more lively than she was usually, Jack drinking in all the twins’ talk, Rosalie running from one to the other and getting playful cuffs and cuddles. And Mercy and Susan.

Mercy sat next to Tom, feeling self-conscious and trying to make sure Susan was included in everything. Bummy went down the Angel for jugs of ale and they had a very jolly evening.

Everyone tried to think of cheerful things. They reminisced, had a song or two, and Bummy asked the lads questions for the umpteenth time about the training, about soldiering.

After she’d wheeled Susan back home Mercy stepped out again to meet Tom so they could say their goodbyes in private. They stood near the brewhouse close to Elsie’s shrine to Frank. Tom was solemn suddenly, the reality of his departure the next day seeming so close now. For Mercy, the thought of being physically parted from him was unbearable.