The Girls They Left Behind (41 page)

‘What is it?’ she whispered. She sounded drained, as if every ounce of strength had been beaten out of her. And no wonder, he thought. ‘Is it a boy?’

‘A -?’ He looked hurriedly, feeling guilty that he hadn’t noticed at once. ‘Yes. Yes, it’s a boy. What - what should I do next?’

‘Give him to me.’ Her voice was soft. She held out her arms ‘

and he laid the baby in them, across her breast. In the tumult, her smock had got rucked up around her neck, and her heavy breasts were bare. She cuddled the naked, slimy little body against them and to Tommy’s amazement the small head turned as if already seeking milk.

‘Blimey, he’s a hungry little bugger,’ he said. ‘Look at that!’

Kathy smiled at him and he marvelled at the sudden luminous quality of her smile. It was as if the agony of the past hour was already forgotten, just as Freda had said. Then she said, urgently, ‘You’ve got to cut the cord, Tommy. Have you got scissors? And some string or something?’

He shook his head helplessly. The situation was once more desperate. Babies could die - mothers too - if their cords weren’t treated properly. Freda had said so. She’d known someone who’d died because of that. He glanced anxiously around the little shelter, lit so dimly by the hurricane lamp.

What could you find here to tie and cut a baby’s cord with?

‘Here, Mr Vickers, I’ve got a ribbon.’ Stella was already untying it, a blue ribbon that held a hank of hair on one side of her head. She handed it to him and he thanked God that she’d been here after all. Sensible kiddy.

‘Tie it in two places,’ Kathy instructed. ‘Near the baby, and then nearer me. Tie it tightly. I don’t think it matters about cutting it straightaway, so long as it’s tied.’ Her voice began to fade. ‘Oh God, here comes the afterbirth. Here - take him, quick.’

‘The what?’ Tommy stared in dismay as her body began to contort again. He snatched the baby and handed him to Stella. ‘Kathy, what’s happening now, for God’s sake? Don’t tell me you’ve got another one in there!’

She laughed in spite of her discomfort. ‘I hope not! It’s the afterbirth - it’s what the cord’s attached to. It’s a bit mucky, I’m afraid …’ Again, her body contracted and she closed her eyes and tensed herself. And then it came, gushing out between her legs as the baby himself had come. An almost black mass of flesh and mucus, like a grossly deformed liver, which squirmed as if it had a life of its own and lay on the bed, pulsing like a slowly dying creature.

‘Ugh!’ Muriel exclaimed. ‘It’s horrible!’

Tommy thought so too, and he would rather that the little girls had not seen it. But children were seeing a good many things these days that it would be better they didn’t see, and birth had to be better than death. He wondered what to do with the squidgy-looking mass. Was having a baby always as mucky as this?

Suddenly, he became aware of a change. He looked up at the roof, almost puzzled, and then grinned.

‘Here,’ he said, ‘the planes have stopped.’

Kathy lifted her head. The baby was back on her breast now and the two girls were close to her, gazing down at their new brother. They all listened for a moment, scarcely able to believe the sudden silence.

‘D’you think it’s over?’ she whispered.

Tommy made up his mind.

‘Over or not, I’m going to get you some help. Annie Chapman’s girl Olive, she might be home, she’ll come across.

And I’ll go for Mrs Frame as well.’ He hesitated. ‘There’s er, there’s nothing else likely to - er - well, you know …?’

Kathy laughed weakly. ‘No, the afterbirth’s the only thing.

But it ought to be attended to.’ She smiled down at the baby lying across her bosom. ‘And so should this little chap. He badly needs a bath!’

So that’s what the hot water was always wanted for. There was certainly a lot of clearing up to do. Tommy surveyed the mess on the floor, the blood-soaked bed. It looked as if there’d been a murder in here rather than a baby being born.

‘I’ll go and get someone to come and look after you,’ he said, and turned towards the doorway.

Kathy reached out a hand and brushed his leg with her fingers. He looked down at her.

‘Thanks, Tommy,’ she said quietly. ‘Thanks a lot.’

Tommy nodded, suddenly unable to speak. He pushed aside the curtain, taking care not to let the slightest glimmer of light escape, and climbed out into fresh, cold air. He gazed up at the stars.

A few minutes ago, death had been raining down from that dark, star-pricked sky. But all the death the Germans hurled down couldn’t stop new life being born. Kathy’s baby had been determined to live, determined to survive. And if a newborn baby could be that tough …

You’ll never beat us, he told Hitler silently. You’ll never, never win.

Christmas was coming. The second Christmas of the war.

Last year, they had all been waiting, wondering if anything was ever going to happen. Now, they were in the thick of it and nobody could pretend it would soon be over.

Micky Baxter and his gang were still running wild. There were a few teachers in Portsmouth, mostly retired, who were attempting to run a school of sorts. They gathered children together in front rooms, giving them lessons one or two days a week and setting them homework to do the rest of the time.

Some of the children bothered, some didn’t. Some rarely attended.

‘He ought to come to lessons,’ an elderly schoolmaster said, knocking on Nancy Baxter’s door one day. ‘When this war’s over, it’s people with education who’ll be needed to get the country back on its feet. Your Micky’s bright enough to do well if he puts his mind to it.’

‘Go on,’ Nancy said cynically, ‘education won’t do my Micky no good. Teachers’ve always had a down on him. He’ll have to look out for ‘imself, same as I’ve ‘ad to. That’s what it’s like for people like us.’

The teacher looked past her along the narrow passage with its dark brown, peeling wallpaper and cracked linoleum. A stale, sour smell wafted through from the back room. He sighed.

‘But it doesn’t have to be like that. He could pass exams, get a good job. He could better himself, don’t you see?’

‘Better himself?’ Nancy echoed. She removed the cigarette end that hung from her lip and sneered. ‘Yes, that’s just it, ain’t it? We’re not good enough as we are, we’ve got to better ourselves. An’ we’ve got to do it your way. My Micky’s got to waste his time sitting in school listening to a lot of fat-arsed teachers with posh voices tellin’ ‘im he’s got to learn bits of poetry and draw maps of China. What good’s that sort of thing to a boy like my Micky, eh? What good’s it ever done you to learn poetry and draw China? It didn’t stop a war startin’, did it? It didn’t stop Hitler tryin’ to take over the world.’

The schoolmaster gazed at her blankly and Nancy put the cigarette back between her lips.

‘My Micky’s ‘elpin’ me at ‘ome,’ she said dismissively. “E’s got a job workin’ in a shop, errand boy. ‘E’s doin’ more good there than ‘e’ll ever do in school. Anyway, ‘e’s not far off fourteen, so you might as well save your breath and your shoe leather.’

She slammed the door and went back inside. Her mother was sitting by the fire, holding out her hands to the small pile of smouldering coal. The baby Vera was playing with a couple of battered saucepan lids.

‘Silly old fool,’ Nancy said scornfully. ‘Comin’ round ‘ere trying to get our Micky to go for lessons. ‘Tain’t natural, tyin’

a boy like ‘im down to a desk all day. Stands to reason ‘e won’t do it.’

‘Still, ‘e does have a point, Nance,’ Granny Kinch said.

‘People do get on better now with a bit of education. You couldn’t get it when I was young. I learned to read but your dad never did, and ‘e always wished ‘e ‘ad.’

‘Micky can read, and add up too. That’s all a boy like ‘im wants. The rest is just rubbish.’

‘It’d keep ‘im off the streets a bit,’ Mrs Kinch said. ‘We never know where ‘e is these days.’

‘I don’t need to know where ‘e is,’ Nancy replied, lighting another cigarette. ‘Not so long as ‘e keeps bringin’ stuff ‘ome the way ‘e does.’

The three of them kept up the fiction of Micky’s job as errand boy, although he came home less frequently now with food or ornaments and clothing. People were becoming more careful, keeping their doors locked when the siren sent them running for the shelter. But there were still enough careless ones to bring in a steady supply, and the store-room in the basement of the bombed house was filling with things the boys kept for themselves.

Shrapnel was the latest treasure to be salvaged from the air-raids. They vied with each other to find the largest, most jagged pieces and arranged them around the cellar. Cyril found a large shell case and stood it in the middle of the ramshackle table, where Micky gazed at it enviously.

‘I’ll get a better one than that,’ he said. ‘I’ll get a proper bomb. An unexploded one. There’s plenty around after a raid.’

‘What, and blow us all up?’ Jimmy jeered. ‘Fat lot of good that’d be.’

‘A dud one, then. Or I’d take out its fuse. That’s easy. I saw a bit about it in my comic. I bet I could do that.’

‘Bet you couldn’t. Proper soldiers get blown up doing that.’

Micky leaned back and out his feet up on the table. He was smoking a fag-end he’d found in the gutter. Sometimes he pinched cigarettes from his mother’s bag, but she kept a sharp eye on them and gave him a good clout if she thought there were any missing.

‘I’m goin’ to be a proper soldier one day. A Commando.

That’s what I’m goin’ to be - creepin’ about round the enemy’s camps, layin’ mines and blowin’ things up and that.

And killin’ sentries with one blow.’

‘I’d rather be a bomber pilot,‘Jimmy said. ‘Fancy dropping a bomb and seeing a whole city go up in flames. I bet that’s really good.’

Micky said nothing. His mind had drifted away to a fantasy of dark woods surrounding the perimeter of a German army camp. He was crawling on his belly, wirecutters in his hand.

He had already killed two sentries when he was accosted by a third. One chopping movement with the side of his hand, and the third lay dead as well. From there, it was a simple matter to slice his way through the wire fence and stalk silently to the hut where Hitler, Goebbels and all the rest satin conference.

He took a grenade from his pocket, tugged out the pin with his teeth and lobbed it through the window …

Micky Baxter, world hero.

Jess and Frank could not decide whether to bring the children home for Christmas. Frank was against it. The bombing was getting worse, he said, and it was crazy to bring kids back from safety just for the sake of a few days’ celebrations. What was there to celebrate anyway? There was almost no food in the shops, nothing much to give them for presents, and any party games they might be playing would probably have to be played in the air-raid shelter.

They were better off where they were. And the Government agreed with him, he pointed out. They were urging parents to leave the children where they were.

‘But we’re losing their childhood,’ Jess argued miserably.

‘We hardly know what the boys are doing now. They’ll never be this age again. And Rose is making herself ill.’

Frank signed. He knew Jess was becoming really anxious about Rose. Mrs Greenberry had written twice to say that the girl was worrying herself sick over the bombing. She woke each morning, terrified that her home and parents had been blown up in the night, and listened desperately to the News on the wireless, avid for any mention of Portsmouth.

‘I still think they’re better off where they are,’ he said. ‘I’d rather they were alive and miserable than dead.’

‘But they wouldn’t be. It’s safe enough in the shelter. We’re still alive. We haven’t even had any bombs round here.’

‘What about St Alban’s church? What about the railway?

Look, you don’t know where the next bomb’s going to fall nobody does. They just drop ‘em wherever they feel like it.

And even Anderson shelters can’t survive a direct hit. Look at that one in St Mary’s Road, a whole family killed.’

Jess knew he was right. But she longed for her boys and her daughter. It wasn’t natural, families being split up. Sometimes she thought Kathy Simmons was right and you ought to stay together and keep the home going no matter what happened.

She went over to Kathy’s every day to give a hand, feeling guilty that she hadn’t been on hand when the baby was born.

Fancy the poor young woman having to go through that with no woman beside her! But the baby was thriving despite his dramatic arrival, and didn’t even seem to notice the noise of the bombs, Kathy said. Hardly any wonder, when they’d been the first things he’d heard in this world.

Everyone in the street knew now the story of how Tommy Vickers had delivered the baby, and he was a bit of a hero, though he shrugged it off with his usual grin and a joke. All the same, he’d obviously been proud as Punch when Kathy had said she was going to name the baby Thomas after him.

‘He was going to be George, after the King,’ she said, ‘but it wasn’t the King who came into the air-raid shelter and brought him into the world, was it!’

Kathy seemed to have recovered well enough too, though Jess knew she was worried about Mike, facing danger at sea every day in the Merchant Navy convoys.

But everyone had someone to worry about. There was Annie, fretting over her Colin, and Alice Brunner still creeping about like a shadow and leaving almost all the work of the shop to joy.

At least some of the other men were at home now. Derek Harker and Bob Shaw, both in Portsmouth’s own 698 Unit, were able to come home at weekends, and so was George Glaister. Not that that seemed to give either him or Ethel much pleasure! Jess could hear them arguing sometimes, through the adjoining wall of the little terraced houses.

‘I suppose you think just because you’re a soldier now, you can rule the roost at home,’ Ethel remarked sarcastically.

‘Well, that khaki uniform doesn’t cut any ice with me. I know it’s still George Glaister inside it, just as much of a mouse as he’s ever been.’

George didn’t answer. He didn’t want to argue with Ethel, and tried to keep silent when she started nagging, but somehow that seemed to make her worse. She’d go on and on, her voice rising all the time, and if he didn’t give her any answers she’d provide them for herself, just to give herself something to argue about.