Soldier Girl (2 page)

‘That you, Em?’ She heard Mr Radcliff’s voice before she saw him. She felt very much the junior in the group of ARP wardens, not yet being quite eighteen, but of all of them, Mr Radcliff was the kindest to her in a fatherly way.

‘Yes, it’s me. You must have eyes like a cat – I never saw you!’

‘Oh, that’s me – eat plenty of carrots!’ he chuckled. ‘Doing all right are yer? A quiet night it looks like tonight, thank God. Jerry must be turning his attention somewhere else for once. We’ll go and have a cuppa in a tick, shall we?’

‘Yes, all right.’

‘Did I hear a bit of a racket earlier? Pubs coming out? I s’pose they’re getting into the Christmas spirit.’

‘They’re out now,’ Em said, hearing voices at the other end of the street. A ragged rendering of ‘Good King Wenceslas’ drifted towards them then died in hasty shushing. ‘It was just a bit of carry on – someone had a bit too much, you know.’

‘Oh, ar. There’s always one. So, shall us go and get the kettle on?’

Mr Radcliff liked to make tea and stand in the street drinking it, keeping an eye on everything. Em held the welcome warmth of the mug close to her chin and sipped the sweet brew. There was something very reassuring about Mr Radcliff. They talked about the raids. They hadn’t half had some nights – really frightening, with the sirens going, searchlights knifing across the sky, having to be out in it when the bombs were coming down, putting incendiaries out and trying to make sure everyone was under cover. It had started in August over Brum and there had been at least one really bad raid every month and others in between. Some nights the sirens were going on and off all night and the morning found them all exhausted, sick with nerves and tiredness and emerging fearfully to see what the damage was and whether there’d be any water to brew a cuppa. The centre of Birmingham was deeply scarred and many of the neighbourhoods too, especially the ones like theirs, the districts of Nechells, Vauxhall, Duddesdon, close to the centre. After the last lot the King himself had come and walked round nearby Aston, talking to people.

‘Your young man coming to see yer tonight?’ Mr Radcliff asked, taking Em’s empty mug.

‘Oh I s’pect so – he’s doing a split shift tonight,’ Em said shyly. For a year now she and Norm had been courting. He was a few months her senior. He usually came to find her and say hello whenever she was on duty, if he got the chance. It made her ever so proud when he did that, turning up in his police uniform.

‘Nice lad,’ Mr Radcliff remarked. ‘You want to hold on to him.’

Em blushed in the darkness, though it was nice to hear someone praising Norm. She thought he was wonderful – certainly the best thing to happen to her in a long time – even if Joyce teased her and said Norm was like a clown with his two left feet and sticky-out ears. Em would get cross and upset with her until Mom said, ‘That’s just sisters – don’t you take any notice.’ He was sweet to her and he loved her and told her so earnestly, looking at her with his sincere hazel eyes, and that was all she needed to know.

‘Better get back,’ Mr Radcliff said.

‘Ta for the tea – I needed that,’ Em said.

She made her way back to Kenilworth Street, thinking about Molly again. Molly had a factory job, but she was in with a bad crowd, always off with some bloke, round the pubs. It had been sad, seeing how she was tonight. She couldn’t go on the way she was.

With a sense of dread, Em thought,
What’s going to become of you, Molly?

Molly woke the next morning with a thumping headache, an urgently full bladder, and a sense of complete despair. There were a few seconds before she remembered, and then it all came flooding back, what had happened last night, Mom’s vile words, her running out to George, the pub. Of what she’d done after that, she could only remember glimpses. Hadn’t she ended up lying in the street? And hadn’t her old friend Em been in it somewhere?

And what Mom had said. Molly turnedon to her back, the bedsprings squeaking loudly, and put her hands over her face. Even the dim light from the window seemed to knife into her eyes.

‘Oh God,’ she groaned. In that moment she truly wanted to die, just be swallowed up in darkness for ever, away from pain and shame. She felt too sick and desperate even to cry.

But she was going to have to get up. It was either that or wet the bed. Groggily, she hauled herself upright until her magnificent frame was perched uneasily on the side of the bed, and surveyed her options. Either she could go and relieve herself in the shared privy, which meant going out into the street and walking all the way round the back – the way she was feeling this morning, that seemed like walking to the ends of the earth – or she could use the chamber pot by her mom’s bed, already half full of a bronze-coloured, stinking liquid. Her innards bucked at the thought.

The sight of the po, and the bare boards, and the crumbling walls of the room, and the even more depressing sight of the heaped mound of Iris, her mother, snoring intermittently on the other bed, did nothing to raise her spirits. Dear God, couldn’t things ever get better? They’d always been rotten, ever since she could remember, and they were never going to improve with Iris and Joe pouring almost every penny that came into the house down their necks, that was for sure. When was she ever going to get out of here?

Anger drove her to her feet, and it only dawned on her then that she was still fully dressed. She stared down at herself bemused, trying to recall going to bed. She must have come in and flung herself straight down. Still, that settled it – all she had to put on was her shoes. Pushing her feet into them she winced, cursing. Looking down, she saw her lisle stockings were all torn and there was blood on her left heel. So she started shuffling along on the backs of them.

For a moment she stopped beside Iris. Her mother was forty-six years old and looked twenty years older. Molly stared down at her, seeing a big-boned woman who had once been statuesque, though she was now well past her finest. Her large frame, which Molly knew she had inherited, was upholstered with thick layers of fat. Iris lay on her back, one plump arm splayed over the side of the bed, her immense breasts only just contained by a torn camisole which had aged to a yellowish grey. As she shifted in the bed a rank and sweaty smell wafted up. Her head was turned to one side, pressing on the rolls of fat under her chin; her faded brown hair was still roughly pinned up in her distinctive topknot, though much of the hair had worked loose in her sleep and had gathered into a frizz. Iris’s thick lips were parted, those lips which had spat out vile secrets to Molly last night. Snores rattled in the back of her throat.

She looks like a pig, she
is
a pig . . .
Molly stared at Iris’s rounded nose and pugnacious nostrils. But in the prominent cheekbones and long neck she could see her own inheritance of features. The main difference was her hair, which was thick and blonde.
Where did
that
come from?
she wondered bitterly. But heaven forbid she should end up like Mom with her coarse, broken-veined skin and liver spots already showing on her cheeks and red nose – like
him.
Molly clenched her fists. She felt like killing the great fat sow, breaking the chamber pot and its stinking contents over her head. She started to shake with anger and loathing.

Iris’s eyes opened, narrow and piggy between dark lashes, the whites bloodshot from a life of drinking. That was all they did now, she and Joe, they drank and drank, courtesy of Molly’s wages and Bert’s.

Iris struggled to focus, frowning with confusion. ‘Molly – that you? Make us a cuppa will yer? Don’t feel too good.’ The eyes closed, and in seconds she was snoring again.

A hand over her heaving stomach, Molly crept down the bare boards of the stairs. The house had one room downstairs with a tiny scullery at the back and two upstairs. Bert had the other room when he deigned to come home at all, and wild horses wouldn’t drag her into sharing a room with him, the filthy bugger. She’d sleep in the coal hole rather than go anywhere near him. After all, he’d had the perfect grandfather to learn his dirty tricks from, hadn’t he?

Downstairs, Joe was asleep in his chair by the dead fire and the room was very cold. He had an old blanket over his knees. Molly tiptoed past, seeing his almost hairless head tilted to one side, the scalp dotted with downy tufts of grey. She couldn’t bear to look at his face, and not only because she knew how it would be: the drooping, toothless mouth, his defeated, old man’s face even though he was only a year older than Iris. Unlike Iris, he had always been able to arouse tenderness in Molly. She couldn’t remember him before the Great War, back in those innocent days when he was sprightly and fit and had even been able to play the piano. They’d actually owned a piano back then, she’d been told, though it’d been sold long since, after Joe had come back from France a wreck, his nerves and health shattered and his younger self buried in the mud with his dead comrades. Molly had often wondered what kind of man he would have been had he never gone to war, had married a different wife, had had a chance. Time after time she had been told of his decency as a young man, his intelligence, and she had clung to these stories. ‘He were a good lad, yer father was,’ those who remembered would say. ‘A kind-hearted, decent fella, and he could sing and play lovely. Such a shame . . .’ She had seldom seen anything of this, except for a kindly gleam in his more usually vacant eyes. But she had clung to that image in hope for the best she might have in herself. Maybe she was like him, not like Mom, she had often desperately hoped.
I don’t have to end up like her,
she used to tell herself.

But today she would not look at Joe. Joe Fox – some man she lived with, but not Dad. A stranger, in terms of blood. She went to the mantelpiece for the privy key, tied to a cotton reel, and went outside, down the narrow entry and round to the yard on to which faced five back houses. Molly’s own house was at the front of these. She slunk across the yard with her head down and her arms folded, not wanting to speak to anyone. Someone was in the brew house where the washing was done, steam curling out from the water heating in the copper. Two raggedy kids were playing outside, waiting for their mother. Normally Molly was friendly, and it was a nice yard, much better than some they’d lived on. It was clean and people were decent to her, felt sorry for her, most likely. But today she was too upset for friendliness.

All three toilets were occupied and she waited until a chain flushed and a woman came out of one, holding the door open.

‘All right Molly? You ain’t looking so good this morning. Bit of a night, was it?’ She went off, chuckling.

Molly bolted herself inside the smelly privy, sinking on to the already warm wooden seat with a sigh – a combination of both physical relief and deep inner despair. The sight of the crudely built brick walls between which she was perched and the roughly cut squares of newspaper hanging from a nail on the back of the door dragged her down even further.

Surely to God there must be something better than this. There
had
to be . . . She felt absolutely at rock bottom.

A thought came then, as if someone had shone a bright light in her head.

I’m not staying here any longer. I’ve got to get out if it’s the last thing I do. I’ll sink into the mud, else.
And a second later, she had the answer.
I know – I’m going to join up!

What had set Molly off was what had happened the previous night.

She had always been restless about jobs, moving from firm to firm, easily bored. Her latest was in a factory in Vauxhall which had gone over to the war effort, making tin hats and jerry cans and other war needs that could be bashed out of metal.

Last night she’d worked on late to finish a batch and hurried home in the dark, tense, like everyone else, waiting in fear of the sirens going off. No one wanted to get stuck in a raid, having to get off the bus and find a shelter or risk it, depending whether the bus driver was prepared to go on or not. Some nights the raids began early and were on and off all night. You just never knew.

It had already been a dull grey day and the darkness was of a heavy, cloaking kind with a lid of cloud. No bomber’s moon at least. It was hard to hurry in the blackout. Molly got off the bus with a weary heart and wended her way carefully along the dark Nechells streets. It was an old, poor neighbourhood, close to the heart of the city, which had suffered a lot of raids. So far, though, no one they knew had been bombed out. But the Buttons worried Molly to death. Stanley and Jenny Button lived a few streets away and were the kindest people Molly knew. Jenny Button had taken her in as a child, when Iris’s behaviour to Molly had forced her to run away. Molly loved the two of them far more than she did her family. They had always been so kind to her, had shown her that life doesn’t have to consist of cruelty and neglect. Stanley was an invalid and couldn’t walk, but the two of them flatly refused to have anything to do with going into any sort of shelter.

‘Stanley and me will take our chances where we are, in our own home,’ Jenny Button said with dignity. ‘We’re not having those Jerries forcing us into some godforsaken cellar.’

There was no arguing with them. Molly knew that quite a few older people took this attitude. Every time there was a raid Molly rushed round to see if they were all right.

The walk home seemed to take ages. It had been a long day, her left shoe was rubbing her heel raw so that she was limping, and there was no telling what she’d find at home.