The Bells of Bournville Green Read online

  ANNIE MURRAY

  The Bells of Bournville Green

  PAN BOOKS

  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Part Two

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Part Three

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Part Four

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Part Five

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Part One

  Birmingham, 1962–3

  Chapter One

  December 1962

  ‘What the flippin ’eck’s the matter with you two today? It’s Christmas isn’t it, not a wet weekend in Bognor?’

  They were in the Girls’ Dining Room at Cadbury’s, which was decked out festively with streamers and tinsel. The young woman who had spoken, one of their group of pals, had plonked her soup down on the table and pulled up a chair beside Greta and Pat and the rest of them.

  Greta looked up, managing to pull her round, pretty face into its infectious smile.

  ‘That’s better – yer enough to put me off my dinner – faces as long as Livery Street! Nothing up, is there?’

  Greta didn’t want to say what was wrong. Quiet, steady Pat was her best pal from when she started at the Cadbury works three years ago, and she kept some things even from her. She didn’t feel like pouring out what had happened this morning in front of the rest of them: the row with Mom, the angry, bitter words.

  ‘Oh, I’m all right,’ she grinned. She always tried to be the life and soul. ‘It’s Pat here who’s down in the mouth.’

  Pat never had it easy, and today her gentle face looked pale and strained.

  ‘It’s Josie – she was took bad last night. We didn’t get much sleep.’

  Pat’s older sister Josie was severely handicapped and it was all Pat’s Mom could do to look after her. Pat carried a heavy burden of care as well. She was a quiet, sweet-natured girl with thick brown hair, always tidily fastened back for work, and a lovely dimple which appeared when she smiled.

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’ Greta asked carefully. Josie, a woman of twenty-one, could neither speak nor walk.

  Pat shrugged. ‘Dunno really. You know what she’s like – she can’t say. She was running a fever but she was ever so restless all night.’

  ‘Poor thing,’ Greta said, her blue eyes full of sorrow for her friend.

  ‘Never mind, worse things happen at sea, eh?’ Pat rallied herself. She never liked to dwell on difficult things. ‘I’ll get this cuppa tea down me and I’ll feel better. I’m just a bit whacked, that’s all.’

  ‘I bet you are,’ one of the others said sympathetically. ‘You coming to the hop after? Do yer good!’

  Every Monday there was a lunchtime dance in the Girls’ Gym, where they jived and bounced during the dinner hour.

  ‘Oh, not today,’ Greta said. ‘I’m not in the mood.’

  ‘Ooh dear – you have got it bad, Gret!’

  ‘Eh—’ Pat nodded across the room. ‘There’s your Mom. Ooh, look at her hair!’

  Greta glanced round to see her mother, Ruby Gilpin, advancing across the dining room, like a ship in full sail. She worked at Cadbury’s three days a week, in the Filled Blocks section where there were a lot of part-timers. Buxom, pink-faced and smiling, she had given her hair a peroxide bleach yesterday and it crouched in startlingly bright, lacquered layers on top of her head. She was calling to one of her friends over by the long windows which looked out over the winter grey of Bournville Lane. She completely ignored Greta, as if she was invisible.

  ‘Can’t get away from the old lady, can I?’ Greta rolled her eyes comically. As usual she acted as if she had not a care in the world, though inside she boiled with hurt and anger. She could still hear the shuddering slam of the front door when she stormed out that morning. The rows had got worse lately, but there had never been one this bad before.

  But Pat was watching her. ‘Is everything all right?’ she asked softly.

  ‘Oh yeah – course.’ She brushed it off, nudging Pat in the ribs. ‘Why wouldn’t it be?’

  Pat’s life wasn’t easy, but she didn’t have a mother who had already got through three husbands and several other blokes since, so that you never knew who’d be there when you got home or what might be going on. Greta avoided taking anyone back to the house. God knows, if her employer had any idea how Ruby carried on she’d surely be out on her ear! Cadbury’s, who expected virtuous conduct from their employees based on their own Quaker principles, were very strict about drinking and moral behaviour, but so far Ruby had got away with it. And Greta was ashamed even to tell Pat all of it. Pat’s family had their problems, but Pat had grown up in Bournville, with an apple tree in the garden and piano lessons and a Mom and Dad with a couple of children. And Pat’s Mom looked after Josie beautifully.

  Pat looked doubtfully at her but she wouldn’t push it, not in front of the others. She turned to look out of the long dining-room windows.

  ‘Looks as if it’s coming on to snow,’ Pat said.

  ‘A white Christmas,’ someone else said. ‘So they say.’

  They ate up their soup and cobs and chatted about this and that. Greta and Pat were in the Moulding Block, on the wrapping machines for sixpenny bars of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk. One of their friends was on Chocolate Buttons, which had only been launched a couple of years earlier. Wherever they were working, though, they always tried to make sure they met for the dinner break.

  They quickly cleared up their plates and headed off to put their overalls on again to start work, Greta trying to crack jokes and look cheerful. But Pat stopped her, a hand on
her arm, pulling her out of the way of the stream of Cadbury women leaving the dining room.

  ‘You and your Mom had a bit of a ding-dong?’

  Greta nodded, shaking her head fiercely because to her annoyance she felt her eyes filling. It all seemed to well up lately, all these angry, desperate feelings.

  ‘What – over him?’ Pat winked. ‘Surely she can’t have anything against Dennis – he’s squeakier clean than a freshly washed window.’

  Dennis, who worked at Cadbury’s maintaining the machines, was very sweet on Greta, as were several of the other lads, drawn by her curvaceous figure, her sunny golden-haired looks and lively personality. Of all the girls, she had the most attention from the Trolley Boys, who came by at the end of the production lines to take away the packed boxes of chocolate. Most of them were in their late teens and pestered the girls determinedly. Greta had had to learn ways to brush them off with a verbal put-down, as she got pestered more than most, though she enjoyed the spark of flirting with them as well.

  Greta couldn’t keep it in any more. She needed to relieve her feelings. ‘Not Dennis! Him – Mom’s flaming latest – Herbie Small-Balls!’

  She saw Pat crease up with giggles at this and couldn’t help joining in. Greta’s Mom’s boyfriends were always a source of mirth, but of all of them fat, balding Herbert Smail, who fancied himself as a big noise down at the Leyland works in Longbridge, had to be the worst of the lot.

  ‘Getting serious is it?’ Pat said, trying to contain her laughter and be sympathetic.

  ‘Yes – and it’s not funny,’ Greta said, giggling unstoppably as well. She wiped her eyes, careful not to smudge her eye-liner.

  ‘Come on you two – quit yer tittering and get back to work,’ one of the older women said.

  ‘I’ll tell you later,’ Greta said gratefully as they headed back over to their block under the ominously grey sky, amid the drifting smell of liquid chocolate which they were so used to they barely noticed it any more. ‘But ta, Pat – you’ve cheered me up already.’

  ‘Glad to be of service,’ Pat said with a wink.

  They went back to the belt by the wrapping machine, with its endless river of little bars of chocolate. Greta looked across at Pat, feeling a bit ashamed. Here she was, making heavy weather of her life when she sensed that Pat had more weighing on her than she ever let on either. She caught Pat’s eye and winked at her.

  Where would I ever be without my pals? she thought.

  Chapter Two

  What had done it that morning was finding Herbert Smail sitting there large as life and twice as ugly at the kitchen table.

  ‘Morning, Greta,’ he said unctuously as she appeared, fortunately already dressed, instead of wandering down in her nylon nightie as she sometimes did for an early-morning cuppa.

  Greta jumped, heart pounding. Refusing to look at him she went to the teapot, to find it had the dregs in it, still warm. She had no idea he was there! And now he’d very obviously spent the night in the house. The only blessing was she hadn’t heard anything – God what a thought!

  ‘You stricken with premature deafness by any chance?’ Herbert said, rather less pleasantly. He pronounced it ‘prema-tewa’, rolling his r’s in an affected way. He was one of those know-it-all types, thought he’d swallowed the dictionary. ‘I believe I was speaking to you – or was that just a figment of my imagination?’

  Greta scowled.

  ‘Yeah, and this is my house and if I don’t feel like speaking to you first thing in the morning, I won’t – and I don’t, all right?’

  She stumped off back upstairs with her cup. Lukewarm tea was better than spending another minute in the kitchen and having to see his pink neck, his fat belly bulging under that sludge-green cardi and his greasy comb-over. Mom must have truly lost her mind to go anywhere near a revolting slob like that!

  Greta dressed furiously, trying not to think about the sadness of her mother’s life so that she would have to feel less resentful towards her. But of course it all welled up anyway, the thoughts and memories. Her elder sister Marleen’s Dad, Ruby’s first husband, Frank Gilpin, had been in Bomber Command and was killed flying a raid in 1943. Then Greta’s own father, a GI called Wally Sorenson, had been a ‘D1’ – killed on the first day of the D-Day landings on Omaha Beach. Wally’s kindly parents Ed and Louisa Sorenson had made Ruby and her two daughters warmly welcome in their home in Minnesota after the war. Greta had adored her grandparents, who were kind and loving and made her feel as if she had a proper family, and it had looked as if they could have a good life over there. She still used their name, Sorenson, her father’s name.

  But then of course Mom had to go and pick some walking disaster of a bloke to marry. Ruby’s marriage to Carl Christie had lasted barely a year, and it was the most frightening time Greta could remember in her life. Christie had turned out to be a damaged and violent man who had terrorized Ruby and reduced her to a frightened, unkempt woman with no confidence left, before she had finally managed to rouse herself and get away from him. And it hadn’t been just Mom who had messed everything up. Greta pulled her stockings on with furious resentment. Marleen had gone off the rails as well, causing all sorts of trouble, running wild until Ed and Louisa Sorenson had had enough and washed their hands of the family.

  ‘We’re always your grandparents,’ Louisa had told Greta, tears running down her gentle face. They were God-fearing Christian people and were at their wits’ end with Ruby and Marleen. ‘We love you, Greta. You remind us so much of our beloved Wally and we’ll write you, dear. We do so want to have you in our lives. But we just can’t tolerate this whole situation any more.’

  Although Ruby and Greta had kissed the Sorensons goodbye, turned their backs on the dream of America and returned to England, Marleen had flatly refused to come. She had taken off, aged only seventeen, with some man who she said was about to marry her. Ruby had seemed unable to stop her, and they had heard from her only twice since, once to say she was married and then, last year, to report the birth of a baby girl called Mary Lou. She was still living somewhere in Minnesota.

  And she’d better bloody well stay there, Greta thought, rage swelling in her over the loss of her grandparents. Marleen always did spoil everything.

  Leaning close to the tilted mirror over her chest of drawers, she applied a thin line of eye-liner, as much as she could get away with at work. She combed her thick, shoulder-length hair, curling it under at the ends. It would have to be tied back and tucked under a cap all day at work so she wanted to make the most of it now. Even in the cheerless morning her hair looked vividly blonde. Angry and churned up as she was, she produced a smile, seeing her expression echoed in the little white-edged picture she had of Wally Sorenson, tucked into the edge of the mirror. She could easily see from where she had inherited her big, square teeth and broad, healthy-looking face.

  ‘Hello, Dad.’ Her eyes filled as she hungered for this man she had never even met, for the idea of a father who would have been kind and all-embracing, who would have swung her up in his big strong GI’s arms and cuddled her and given her love of a kind she had never had from a man.

  Wally Sorenson, she could tell by the way her Mom talked about him, had been the one man Ruby had ever truly loved and the one really decent one she had ever had in her life. The war had robbed them of him, and Mom and Marleen, between them, had robbed her of her grandparents as well. Yet Mom was forever on about Marleen, worrying to her friends, especially Edie when she was round here. Marleen this, Marleen that.

  Greta fastened the top button of her blouse, which kept slipping undone, and as she did so she heard the front door slam shut. So he’d gone, had he? Bloody Herbert Small-Balls, the sweaty old sod – good riddance!

  Downstairs smelt of frying and Ruby was by the gas stove. Her navy work skirt hugged her broad hips very tightly and the sleeves of her cream blouse were rolled up her plump arms. The overall effect was of buxom largeness, and even more so with her new ash-blonde hairdo piled on he
r head, little wisps of fringe hanging stiffly down her forehead. She rounded on Greta, her face pink from the hot stove, and slammed a plate on the table with a slice of fried bread and an egg on it.

  ‘’Ere, get that down you.’ Her hands went to her hips and she stood over the table where Greta had sat down sulkily. ‘And what the ’ell d’you think you’re playing at, speaking to Herbert like that? He said you were bloody rude to him!’

  Greta felt her temper flare immediately.

  ‘No I wasn’t.’

  ‘’E said you were.’ Ruby wasn’t budging. ‘’E was quite put out. You’ve got a nerve, wench, going on like that.’

  Greta stabbed her knife into the egg yolk, which trickled stickily across the white plate.

  ‘It’s me who lives here, not him. I came down in my nightie – it was embarrassing.’

  ‘This is my house!’ Ruby erupted. ‘It’s my business who stays here and who doesn’t, and I don’t need a little bint like you thinking you can insult my . . . my . . .’

  ‘What?’ Boiling over, Greta stood up so abruptly that the chair fell over and crashed on to the linoleum. ‘Your boyfriend? The latest in a long line, eh Mom? Have you taken a look at him? I’d’ve thought you could do better than that!’

  Ruby’s face turned even redder. ‘He may not be in the first flush of youth but neither am I. And he’s all right to me – he’s got a good job at the Leyland – prospects. I s’pose I’m not meant to have any life apart from working and cooking and scrubbing for you, eh? I want a bit of life for myself as well as all that drudgery . . .’

  ‘Drudgery! Oh don’t come the martyr with me, Mom – you hardly lift a finger! It’s me left doing all the cooking and cleaning when you’re gadding off with your latest seedy bloke in tow. How many is it now? Albert, Emlyn, Sid . . .’

  ‘Well you’re a fine one to talk, my girl. You’ve had more blokes buzzing round you than I’d had hot dinners at your age!’

  They were yelling now, across the table.

  ‘Well where d’you think I get it from? My glowing example of a Mom!’

  ‘Don’t you talk to me like that, my girl!’ Ruby folded her arms and pitched her voice lower suddenly, so that it was intense and threatening. ‘I’ve had enough on my plate, bringing you and Marleen up with no help from anyone . . .’