War Babies (21 page)

Cissy was squirming and screaming so much in Peggy’s arms that her hat fell off. Rachel bent to pick it up from the cold tiles, a wave of nausea passing through her as she did so. For a
second she felt like giving up on her mother and never seeing her again, while knowing at the same time that she needed her. And she wanted to see her baby sister. She handed Cissy’s hat to
her mother.

‘You can call in.’ Peggy almost had to shout over Cissy’s howls. ‘This isn’t the moment . . . Goodbye.’ And she turned away, without looking back, along the
snowy pavement. Rachel watched. She could hear Cissy crying from all the way along the street.

It was only when she moved into number three with Gladys that Rachel started to get to know the area better and took more notice of their yard, off Alma Street. Aston had
smells of its own. As well as the metallic and oily smells from the factories, and wafts of ale and smoke as you passed the pubs, there were certain aromas that belonged especially to the area
– the whiffs of vinegar which floated from the HP factory and the strange, sour, hoppy scent of Ansells brewery at Aston Cross. As for the yard, of course she was familiar with it, with the
tap and brew house, and the high wall of Taplin & May, the metal-spinning works at the end, from where you could hear the throb of machinery and thin screech of metal. They seldom saw the
workers because they used an entrance round in the next street, but the murmur of voices or occasional shouts came through the wall.

A few of the faces were familiar: Ma Jackman at number two, whose son Edwin, an odd, sullen lad, still lived at home and worked in a nearby factory. She knew the Morrisons, of course, with all
their boys. Mo, she discovered, worked as a road tester at the Norton works and was in their Home Guard unit. Sometimes at the end of the working day, the roar of a motorcycle would be heard in the
yard and Mo would appear astride a Norton 16H round which his sons would gather begging for rides.

‘Gerroff, you lot – out of my way!’ he’d bellow. ‘Don’t flaming touch that or you’ll get me in big trouble. Ernie,’ he’d instruct the oldest
boy. ‘You make sure this lot keep their grubby mitts off it while I have my tea, right?’

Of course this was a lost cause and the moment he parked the thing the lads were all over it. After downing his meal, Mo would come out, yell them all off it and jump astride the bike, off for a
night’s work as a despatch rider for the Home Guard – all before breakfast and back to work the next day.

At number four were the Parsonses, a very old couple. Mrs Parsons, a tiny twig of a person who dressed perpetually in black, lived in terror that she and her husband would have to ‘throw
ourselves on the mercy of the parish’. Into the workhouse, she meant. Gladys, for one, often did their shopping and everyone lent a hand to make sure this did not happen.

At the end, at number five, lived Lil and Stanley Gittins. Lil, a glamour-puss of about forty, wore her mop of faded blonde hair piled on top of her head and frocks which displayed her cleavage
to the best advantage. She was a cheerful soul, except in drink, when she had a tendency to punch people. Gladys described Lil as having ‘a heart of gold but not much going on in the top
storey’. But she seemed to have taken Danny and Rachel into that golden heart and saw them as if they were something out of a romantic tale from
Woman’s Own
.

Just the other day, she had come teetering on her high heels across the uneven bricks of the yard, breaking into snatches of ‘South of the Border’ in between puffs on her cigarette.
Rachel smiled, hearing her as she sat just outside Gladys’s door, taking a few minutes to rest. It was one of the first days with a hint of spring warmth.

‘All right are yer, you two lovebirds?’ she called to Rachel.

‘Yes, ta, Mrs Gittins,’ Rachel said shyly.

‘Ooh, I remember when me and Stanley were like you two. We got wed good and quick, I can tell yer – I had our Marie at about your age!’ She gave a gurgling chuckle.
‘Happy days!’ Lil reached her door, humming another snatch of ‘South of the Border’, and turned with a flick of her bouncing blonde hair. ‘Littl’un all
right?’

Rachel nodded. ‘Think so. She’s moving about a bit.’

‘Think it’s a girl, do you then?’ Lil called, pushing the door open. ‘A mother always knows. Oooh,’ she cooed. ‘If my Stanley was ’ere I’d have
another an’ all.’

Stanley Gittins, who had worked as a railway goods checker, had been called up the year before and was a radio operator in RAF Fighter Command. Rachel had never met him, though she had seen one
of their married daughters coming and going.

She smiled as Lil Gittins disappeared tunefully into her house. Lil was good at jollying everyone through air raids. And it was nice when people were just glad for her about the baby, instead of
acting as if it was something to be ashamed of, like her mother. Even though she and Danny were now married and everything was above board, she felt self-conscious about the round bulge that was
growing in front of her. But Lil Gittins treated her as if it was the most natural and happy thing in the world, and it cheered her up.

It was a good yard with mostly kindly neighbours, but Rachel also saw that Gladys was the gaffer. It was Gladys who got behind either Danny or Edwin to sweep muck away in the yard, who made sure
everyone did their fair share of cleaning in the lavatories and sorted out when the washes were to be done in the copper in the brew house. Gladys also collected the didlum money, a fund everyone
paid a little into to save for Christmas, or for any unexpected emergency, so that they all had a bit put away.

Gladys was full of energy. When she was not on the Saturday Rag Market she was out acquiring things to sell – from houses or other outlets and sales – or she was sorting her wares
and calculating how much they might fetch. She also sewed sheets and pillowcases to sell. The smallest bedroom next to hers had bundles of her stock stored in bags and boxes. The two other things
Gladys did religiously, every week, were go to church on Sunday and to the cinema, either the Globe or her favourite, the Orient at Six Ways, one afternoon in the week.

‘I pay my respects to the Lord,’ she told Rachel, ‘and the pictures is my treat.’

‘You do quite well just on the market, don’t you, Auntie?’ Rachel asked soon after she moved in, when they were folding clothes together in the downstairs room.

‘Well, it’s not bad, even with the war on,’ Gladys said. ‘I’m not selling stuff that’s on the ration. But I’ve done plenty to keep body and soul
together in my time. Cleaning, taking in washing – you name it.’

‘Like my mother,’ Rachel said. But Gladys’s hands were in a worse state than Mom’s, the knuckles swollen.

Gladys paused in the middle of folding an embroidered tablecloth and looked at her. ‘You lost your father,’ she stated.

‘When I was five,’ Rachel said. She didn’t feel like going into how or why. ‘There was just the two of us after that.’

There was silence for a second. ‘She had it hard then, your mother,’ Gladys said.

Rachel didn’t know what to say. She kept her eyes on her work, feeling the gaze of the soldier in the photograph looking down at them and her heart contracted with sadness, but she was too
shy to say anything to Gladys about it. Gladys was so dignified and in a way, forbidding, that she could not imagine ever asking her about anything. She had an aura about her of both strength and a
deep reserve. Rachel thought of the bedroom door upstairs, always closed. Once she’d asked Danny if he’d ever been in there. Danny had shrugged.

‘No. Why should I?’

Rachel knew that she would never go against Gladys’s wishes. Gladys was the queen of the house and they both owed her so much. Rachel already loved and respected her. But she also realized
in that moment that she knew barely anything about this woman who had taken her into her home.

The longer Rachel stayed in Aston, the more Danny and Gladys seemed like her real family. Gladys was in charge in the yard and in her own home and there was something
reassuring about the way she was boss. Rachel soon learned the way she liked things done in the house: the places where she kept her crocks and kitchen things, the fact that her bedroom was private
with the door always kept shut, the fact that she liked good manners around her. She was also very hard-working, forever mending or ironing something or out getting goods to sell on the market. All
these things became details that Rachel never questioned. She felt at home.

And it was wonderful that she and Danny could be together now, properly, even if that did mean nights squashed in side by side in Taplin & May’s cellar, or the air-raid shelter at the
back of the next-door yard.

The city was taking a terrible pounding. Everyone was bonded together by long nights of fear and sleeplessness. Sitting in the shelter with Dolly and Mo Morrison and the boys, and with Lil
Gittins, they drew closer as neighbours. Except Ma Jackman whose response to sharing anything with her neighbours was, ‘You’re not having any of mine . . .’ Old Mr and Mrs Parsons
refused to get up.

‘Me and the old girl’ll stay abed of a night,’ Mr Parsons had told Gladys when the bombing started the year before. ‘If it’s our time to go, we’ll go.
We’d take so long to get in the shelter, my old girl and me, the raid would be over by the time we’d got there. Don’t you go worrying about us, Mrs Poulter. We’ll take what
comes.’

Just before Easter there came a raid as long and destructive as any that had gone before. They staggered out of the shelter in the morning wondering if anything could still be standing. There
was no water in the taps and the air was rank with the smell of burning.

‘I wonder if Mom and Cissy’re all right?’ Rachel said as they limped stiffly back across the yard.

Rachel had reached an arrangement with Peggy whereby she called in every week or two. Sometimes she longed for her mother’s approval and support; at others she thought, I’m a married
woman now and she’ll just have to get used to it. At least it meant she could see Cissy, who was always overjoyed when she visited. She wanted her little sister to know she cared about her
and wanted to be with her.

Danny put his arm round her. ‘Best go and see after work,’ he said. ‘If you can get there. God knows what’ll be running after all this.’ Areas were often cordoned
off where there was the worst damage, a landmine or an unexploded bomb.

‘How much more of it?’ Rachel said tearfully, exhausted by the very idea of a day’s work after the night of howling bombs, the ground shaking around them.

‘At least we’re all here today, that’s the main thing,’ Gladys said, walking beside them with a couple of blankets folded in her arms. ‘Let’s be thankful for
that.’ She started humming one of her hymns. ‘Praise my soul the King of heaven . . .’ Gladys found a lot of comfort in hymns.

As the exhausting day passed and the terrible damage across Birmingham became known, Rachel stopped feeling so sorry for herself and knew Gladys was right. A lot of the burning smell, they
discovered, was from Summer Lane which had been bombed from end to end, and there was damage to St Martin’s church in the Bullring and many other places.

Once again, against the odds, the Devonshire Works stood unscathed amid the destruction all around. Rachel struggled through that day at work as if in a dream, feeling queasy and worn out.

That afternoon, when she finally got back to Aston, she had a shaming disagreement with Gladys.

Walking into the cosy little house, queasy with exhaustion, she threw herself down at the table, resting her head on her arms, feeling she might never get up again. Danny was not home yet. The
room smelt of ironing and Gladys was at the table, peeling potatoes in a bowl and humming again.

‘Did you see your mother?’ she broke off to ask.

‘Yes,’ Rachel mumbled to the tabletop.

‘House all right, is it?’

‘Yes.’ She did not mean to be rude, she was just so weary. She became aware of a movement near her and turned her head to see Gladys standing over her.

‘What’s up with you, miss?’ she enquired tartly.

Rachel was beginning to realize that if there was one thing that was like a red rag to a bull with Gladys, it was people feeling sorry for themselves. But she
did
feel sorry for herself
at that moment. She’d sat up all night, had been working all day – and she was expecting a baby. She was all in!

‘Nothing,’ Rachel said, still slumped over the table. ‘I’m just tired, that’s all.’

‘In case you dain’t notice,’ Gladys said, a dangerous tone in her voice, ‘we was all in the shelter all last night, listening to the same Jerry bombs falling from the
sky. We still have to keep going, you know – the tea won’t cook itself.’

‘But I’m more tired than you,’ Rachel retorted. ‘I’ve been at work all day, and I’m the one who’s having a baby!’ She heard her voice turn high
and whiny. ‘How would you know what it’s like? You haven’t got any children.’

There was a silence so profound that she slowly pulled herself upright, filled with a plummeting sense of dread. She had never seen Gladys look anything like this before, not with her, anyway.
Her jaw was clenched and her eyes bored into Rachel.

‘How do you think you’re in any position to say what I know or don’t know, miss?’ Gladys’s voice was low and hard.

‘I . . .’ She stuttered. ‘Well – you don’t, do you? Have any children, I mean?’

In the tense seconds before Gladys could speak again, there were footsteps along the yard and Dolly’s voice called out, ‘Glad – you in?’

Gladys softened the grim expression on her face. ‘Where else’d I be?’ she called. ‘Come in, Doll.’

Dolly’s face appeared round the door. She had on a red flowery blouse and red lipstick. As ever she looked pretty and rather exotic. ‘All right?’ she said. ‘Ooh,
’ello, Rach – how’s the babby?’

‘All right,’ Rachel said shyly. She felt intense relief that Dolly had turned up when she did. Her heart was still beating fast after the way Gladys had looked at her. She’d
better be careful in future. Gladys obviously thought she was getting above herself and she had never realized before that Gladys was so bitter about not having had children.