War Babies Read online

  For Sam with love

  xx

  Contents

  One

  I

  Two

  Three

  Four

  II

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  III

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  IV

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  V

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  VI

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  VII

  Fifty

  Acknowledgements

  Keep in touch

  My Daughter, My Mother

  The Women of Lilac Street

  Meet Me Under the Clock

  One

  November 1930, Floodgate Street, Birmingham

  ‘It’s a hovel. Nothing but a filthy hovel!’

  The words forced out through Peggy Mills’s lips, full of bitter resentment. Rachel, a sturdy five-year-old, clutching a floppy old doll, looked up at her mother with anxious grey eyes. Peggy was a slender woman of thirty, her frizzy brown hair fastened back under a hat with a narrow brim and a thin face with a waxen complexion. Her usually pretty features were soured with rage at the sight of their new home. In her arms, as they stood there in the winter dusk, she was hugging the last remaining bundle of their possessions.

  ‘It’s even worse than . . .’ She whispered the words, but even so, Rachel could hear the intensity of her bitterness. ‘Look at it – a slum. What can it be like inside – verminous . . . Oh!’ There was a shudder in her voice. ‘I can’t bear to go in. My God, look what he’s reduced me to. I’ll be begging on the street next.’

  It was the last in a row of mean back-to-back terraces, crouched hard up against one of the soaring, blue brick arches of the viaduct. As they stood there a train rumbled deafeningly overhead, raining down smuts. The window frames were caked in soot and grime and the bridge cast the place into permanent shade.

  They had walked here, from the comfortable villa in which they had lived in Sparkhill, along the busy Stratford Road towards the middle of Birmingham. The further in they progressed, the more closely crammed together were the factories, the tiny, dark workshops and cramped, rotting dwellings. The air had thickened, smoke and fumes filling their nostrils. Along the streets, through the chill afternoon air, came the clang of metal against metal, the drone and roar of machines whose heat sometimes breathed, dragon-like, in their faces as they passed the factory doorways. Male voices could be heard shouting over the racket of machines and the wheels of carts clattered by on the road. The cold air was gritty and sour with a mixture of smoke and metallic dusts, sharp with chemicals, and ripe with the stench of horse manure trodden into the cobbles and refuse piled in the crowded back courts of houses. This was the old quarter called Deritend.

  People passed them in the gloom, some eyeing them curiously, others with heads down, wrapped up in their own business. White breath streamed from them in the cold. Peggy flinched away from anyone who came too close. All she wanted was to get safely inside where prying eyes could not see her or guess that she might be the wife of that man named in the newspapers . . . But now that she was in front of the house, she hesitated, looking fearfully at it.

  ‘I can’t bear to open the door,’ she said. ‘God knows what’s behind it – and I don’t suppose there’s even a nub of coal in this godforsaken hole.’

  As they stood there, a man emerged from an entry along the street and moved towards them with an odd, shuffling gait. He was small of stature and dressed in black. As he drew near, Rachel shrank back closer to Peggy, seeing that the man had a terribly misshapen face, distorted by a hare lip. Brown, angry eyes fixed on them from under his cap. Peggy tried to move away, reaching for Rachel’s hand. The man addressed them, barking out a series of abrupt sounds that made no sense. Saliva hung in a string from one corner of his mouth.

  ‘Get away from us,’ Peggy cried, her voice shrill. Rachel felt her mother’s fear in the sharp tug of her hand, pulling her frantically towards the house, which suddenly seemed like a haven. ‘Come on – get in!’ she hissed, shoving the door open.

  Leaving the man still addressing them, mystifyingly, they almost fell inside and shut the front door – a row of parched, nibble-edged planks somehow hanging together – hard behind them.

  After the shadowy street, the gloom was even greater inside, the cold even danker. At first there were the smells: long-dead ash, a rank, vegetable odour and underlying all of it, a stink of damp. Something scuttled and squeaked in the corner. Rachel shivered and gripped her mother’s hand. As their eyes cleared they took in the filthy iron range, the ash and rubbish scattered all over the floor, the stained walls. Otherwise the room was bare except for a lopsided table and two chairs, one with the two back legs missing so that it was keeled over, resting on the back of the seat. Peggy stepped over, peered at the surface of the table and blew across it before putting her bundle down. Without removing her neat black coat, she went to the stairs. Not wanting to be left down there, Rachel followed her up the rotten treads. In the waning afternoon light, through the narrow windows of two mean rooms looking over the street, they saw that the only furniture, in the larger of the rooms, was a thin mattress slumped up against a wall, covered in stained ticking. Peggy said not a word.

  Downstairs, she sank onto the one useable chair, her hands bunched into fists. Her breaths came loud and fast as if she were an angry pair of bellows. Rachel felt her insides knot with dread. Mom looked as if she was going to burst.

  Rachel stood still and waited. Already, during these terrible weeks, she had learned to keep a little secret part inside her locked away from her mother, to take her mind somewhere else because Peggy’s rage and bitterness were so terrifying. She wanted to make things better for Mom but she did not know how and she was starting to feel as if she might burst herself. Her thoughts escaped to the horse she had seen further along the street, an enormous creature with a thick black mane, its face pushed into a nosebag. As they passed, the munching animal had lifted its head and stared at them – at her, she was sure. That horse is my friend, she thought. She wanted to go outside again and find it, to pat it and rub her cheek against its neck for comfort.

  She knew to stand quiet, not to interrupt her mother’s rages. It was something she had had to learn in these weeks since her father’s disappearance, since the day his body was pulled out of the Grand Union below the Camp Hill locks. And that was only the beginning of the life they had known being snatched away from them.

  ‘Look at me!’ Peggy’s words jolted from her. ‘Look at what you’ve done to me, Harold Mills – made me into a pauper! Damn you . . . Damn you!’ Her fist slammed on the rotten table. ‘You stupid, feckless fool! As if I had anyone else to turn to – oh, I can’t bear it!’ She pulled herself upright, the
n turned suddenly on her daughter with a burning expression of loathing in her eyes.

  ‘And you – always there like a millstone round my neck. I never wanted children, you know that, don’t you? Oh no! I let him have one, just for the sake of it! One child! One rock – that’s enough to drown you!’ She gave a horrible, harsh laugh. ‘If it wasn’t for you, I could get away from here and have a life. Look at this place –’ She looked wildly around the room. ‘This is our life now – thanks to your father. Poor, outcast and living in a slum – that’s our life now. So you’d better get used to it!’

  I

  Two

  1932

  ‘Get back, you silly girl – how many more times’ve I got to tell you?’ Peggy snapped as Rachel tried to follow her up the path to the front door of the big house. ‘Stay behind that wall out of sight.’

  This outburst brought on another bout of Peggy’s coughing. She leaned groggily against the wall for a moment, curling forward as her chest rattled and she gasped for breaths of the cold air.

  Rachel, now a solemn-eyed seven-year-old, used to doing exactly as she was told to try and please her mother, shrank back into the gloom outside the imposing gateposts. In her arms she held their little bundle of the day so far, wrapped in a sheet. As her mother’s coughing died down she heard her give a low groan. Rachel wanted to put her fingers in her ears. Mom kept making these terrible, frightening noises. Her chest sounded so bad. Peggy had insisted that Rachel come with her after school, though when they set out she hardly seemed to have the strength to get along. Some of the people today had been so rude and nasty, so Mom was upset and angry as well as poorly.

  They were outside another of the big Edgbaston houses which all seemed like palaces to Rachel. She shifted so that she could see through the gate. The glow of electric lights through the long windows showed glimpses of the curves of deep red curtains fastened back at each side, the elegant symmetry of a china vase, its blue and white patterns lustrous, on the sill inside. It was all so grand and beautiful! How she longed to creep along the path and slip inside, to lie by the fire which she knew must be crackling in the grate in the big room, a soft hearthrug in front of it for her to relax into and feel her frozen limbs uncurl in the warmth . . .

  In the front garden was a horse chestnut tree, its remaining leaves wizened into autumn colours and glowing in the dusky light like a shower of bronze. She wanted to gaze and gaze at it. Fancy having an enormous tree right outside your house! When they stepped out of their house it was straight onto the narrow street with not a blade of grass in sight. Until recently she had forgotten that there were such houses as this, or places where the air was not thick with smoke and factory smells. She thought they were only in stories, not in Birmingham.

  She put the bundle down on the ground behind her. It was nice and soft and she thought about sitting on it but decided she’d better not. It was dark and growing colder, a late October evening with the mist beginning to seep along the streets. Rachel shivered. Under a navy gaberdine, so big it reached most of the way down her shins, she had on the little grey tunic which Mom had made for school. The sleeves of the gaberdine were too long and the cuffs frayed so Mom told her to keep them rolled up. Now, defiantly, she pulled them down to try and warm her hands, but the cold air seemed to slither its way up the sleeves and across her chest. After a moment she crossed her arms and pushed each hand up the opposite sleeve, hugging herself. She was a pale child, her grey eyes looming large in her face. Her mouse-coloured hair just reached her shoulders and was parted on one side and pinned back with two kirby grips. On her feet were scuffed black boots that they had been given at one of the houses. The soles were worn thin and they were too large as yet, so that she slopped along in them and it was hard to run in the school yard. But they were not Mail boots, handed out as charity by the local newspaper! Mom said over her dead body was she ever wearing those – she’d pawn her wedding ring first.

  Rachel looked around her. The wide road was very quiet and clean compared with Deritend. Except for a couple of people whose steps she could hear further along the street, it was almost deserted.

  One of them, a man, was trundling along towards her, pushing a barrow. As he drew closer in his shabby clothes, she saw that he was quite an old fellow, a knife grinder with his tools on the barrow, who must also have been working his way along the street. His head was lowered and he was mumbling to himself. He did not look up as he passed Rachel. She heard his muttering and the creak of the barrow, caught a whiff of stale sweat and then he was gone round the corner. She thought he sounded angry but she wasn’t sure. He was another of those people Mom said she shouldn’t talk to.

  It was quiet enough to hear her mother’s footsteps moving along the side of the house towards the servants’ entrance. Don’t let her start coughing again, Rachel prayed. It seemed wrong for a stranger to see Mom bent over, helpless like that. Rachel heard the door open and quickly hid herself again. There was a quiet exchange of women’s voices, but even so, Rachel’s innards tightened with dread. She was not used to this yet. They had only started out selling on the Rag Market just a few weeks ago, when they could get a pitch. She always went with Mom now, two or three days a week after school, to help carry things. They’d take the tram or a trolleybus out to one of the spacious suburbs and work their way along the streets of big houses. Mom always put on the most genteel voice she could and spoke very politely:

  ‘I was wondering if you had any unwanted clothes or items to sell, madam. I’ll give you a fair price.’

  Last week at a house in Moseley, a man answered the door. ‘You clear off!’ he burst out, voice full of scorn at the very sight of them. ‘I’m not having any of your sort round my place. You go back where you belong, you filthy gyppos!’

  ‘Heaven damn him,’ Peggy burst out once they were along the street. In a low voice she added, ‘May they rot. Rot!’ She stopped and stared at her shaking hands as if she did not know what to do with them. ‘Do I look like a gypsy? Do I?’

  Of course the answer was no. She was a neat woman, quietly spoken and as well dressed as she could manage in her precarious circumstances, in a black coat belted at the waist and her dark green hat with a peacock feather tucked in the brim. The comfortable life she thought she had been promised by her dead husband, Harold Mills, had been cruelly snatched away, both by his death and by the hard truths she found out about him afterwards – the gambling debts, the dreams he had spun in the face of hard reality. After two years of struggling with every kind of work she could do to stay home and out of the factory, cleaning and taking in laundry, outwork from factories like sewing pins or snap fasteners onto cards, she had hit upon an additional source of income – the markets. After all, they only lived a stone’s throw away from them. So she had become a ‘wardrobe dealer’.

  Today they had been to several houses already. Some of the ladies had dismissed her abruptly – or at least, instructed their maids to send her packing. Rachel, waiting outside, heard front doors close with an emphatic bang and then her mother’s hurried footsteps in her black shoes with their tidy heels, their strap and button.

  ‘Right snooty little madam that one,’ Peggy fumed as one of them ordered her to leave. ‘Putting on airs. Anyone’d think she owned that brassy monstrosity of a house herself when she’s nothing more than a skivvy.’

  More often though, after being turned away as if she was something dirty, Mom would be silent, sprung taut as a mousetrap. Rachel could feel it in her, waiting for her to snap.

  The air grew colder while she waited, hugging herself as a ghostly mist spread along the street. She hoped this would be the last one, that they could just go home and get in close to the fire . . . She stood hopping from one foot to the other, trying to keep warm. Her stomach was gurgling with hunger. What on earth was going on? She couldn’t hear a sound. After what seemed an endlessly long time, she heard voices again. The door closed quietly and she heard her mother hurrying back down the path.

>   Peggy stepped out onto the street, a parcel in her arms. Rachel could hear the faint crackle of paper. But before she could say anything, her mother turned her face to the wall, the parcel clutched to her breast and her other hand over her eyes, and burst into tears. Her shoulders shook as the pent-up sobs forced their way out and her weeping made her cough and gulp. Rachel listened helplessly.

  ‘Mom?’ she dared to say eventually. Her voice came out sounding small and scared. Had this lady been nasty like the others?

  ‘Oh!’ Peggy managed, trying to control her tears and her coughing. And ‘O-oh!’ again, a long, distressed sound which twisted Rachel inside. She never knew what to do for Mom but she felt she must do something, because who else was there? It felt as if there was no one but her and Mom in the world. She clutched the long ends of her sleeves tightly in her hands, tears of helplessness rising in her own eyes.

  But Peggy turned to her, tugging the backs of her wrists across her eyes, trying to stifle her crying.

  ‘So kind!’ she said, her voice still wavering like a child’s. ‘She was so kind. It was the mistress of the house herself came and spoke to me. Look –’

  She hurried towards a street lamp a few yards away. Rachel picked up their bundle and scampered after her.

  ‘Such lovely things – look.’ In the circle of light Peggy was unfolding the paper from around the treasure inside. ‘So pretty . . .’

  Rachel saw a folded cream blouse with a collar of intricate lace and little pearl buttons. It was such a delicate, beautiful thing that she did not dare reach out and touch.

  ‘And look –’ There were several pairs of lacy bloomers in a peach colour. ‘They’re new – brand new! And this –’

  At the bottom of the little pile of clothes was a silk garment, also in a blushing peach shade. Rachel did not know what it was, but it looked very pretty and Mom seemed so pleased that she said ‘Ooh’ and ‘Oh!’, infected by her mother’s excitement.

  Peggy turned her pale face towards her. There were dark rings under her eyes which gazed at Rachel so intensely that she had to look away at the pretty armful of clothes with their indications of a soft, feminine life.