War Babies Read online

  ‘I will, won’t I?’

  He kissed her solemnly. ‘Rachel,’ he said in wonder. ‘Rachel Booker.’

  The next day was utterly exhausting. The all-clear sounded at last, just before dawn. By then there was no point in trying to get to Aston. It was nearly time to go to work. They stayed in the shelter even when a lot of the others turned out to go back to their houses. Cold air slid down the stairs and cleared the atmosphere a little. The lady in the hairnet came round with a kettle full of tea and gave them a cup each. Rachel drank it, then had to rush up outside to be sick.

  ‘Oh dear,’ the lady said. ‘That’s being up all night for yer. You going to work?’

  Rachel nodded groggily.

  ‘Well, look – have another cup and see if you can keep it down.’

  ‘You’re ever so kind,’ Rachel said.

  ‘It’s no bother, bab,’ she said, pouring the last of the tea. ‘All you people’ve got to get to work – and you look all in.’

  ‘Come to ours after,’ Danny instructed her as they parted for the day. He kissed her gently. ‘We’ll talk to Auntie. She’ll be all right.’

  It seemed astonishing to her after every raid that when she got to Digbeth, the Devonshire Works were still standing, still producing custard powder despite all the struggles with rationing. Some of the streets around had been badly smashed up in other raids, mess and rubble everywhere. Such a large factory right in town seemed fair game, but so far, though the gutters were littered with spent incendiary canisters, the air thick with smoke, Bird’s stood intact. She worked all day in a daze of tiredness and it seemed forever before it was time to go.

  She stepped thankfully outside, her whole body aching with exhaustion. At the corner of Gibb Street she saw, not Danny, but a woman in a camel coat and dark green hat waiting with a toddler in her arms. It was a moment before she took in the baby’s gingery hair and excitement at seeing her, and realized that it was her mother and Cissy.

  ‘Way-chaw!’ Cissy was shouting, waving her arms. That was the best she could do in saying Rachel’s name.

  Warily Rachel approached them. She took Cissy’s hand, smiling at the little girl who bounced and gurgled with pleasure. Their mother’s stony expression softened a fraction.

  ‘She was asking for you,’ she said.

  Rachel shrugged. Trams rumbled along Digbeth. She waited to hear what Peggy had to say. It was typical of her to use Cissy as a reason for coming.

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ Peggy came out with eventually. As this obviously didn’t get them anywhere, she added, ‘I was hasty last night – what I said.’ She still sounded on the edge of anger and she spoke without looking at Rachel. Her eyes fastened on the other side of the road.

  ‘I don’t want to cast you off.’ This did not sound wholly convincing and she stalled for a moment. ‘You’re going to marry him – that . . . that creature?’

  ‘His name’s Danny,’ Rachel flared. ‘Danny Booker. You knew his auntie, remember?’

  Peggy looked down at her feet. ‘I don’t want any of this anywhere near Fred.’

  Any of this? Rachel’s thoughts burned inside her. Well, it wasn’t my choice to be anywhere near Fred in the first place. But she kept them to herself.

  ‘Where will you live?’

  ‘With Mrs Poulter – in Alma Street.’ She hoped to God this was true.

  Her mother nodded. She seemed helpless.

  ‘Will you come to our wedding, Mom? We will get married – but it won’t be much.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Peggy’s voice was desolate, on the edge of tears, but she seemed, as ever, to be feeling sorry for herself. ‘I’m losing a daughter.’

  ‘Only if that’s what you want,’ Rachel retorted.

  Peggy’s head shot up and the tears did not come. She seemed startled. ‘I need time to think,’ she said abruptly.

  ‘Mom –’ Rachel was near tears herself now. ‘I’m expecting. I am.’ She still had to struggle to make herself believe it. ‘We’ll get married, Danny and me. Only you have to say we can . . .’

  Peggy gave a sharp bark of a laugh. ‘A shotgun wedding. Oh – just what I’ve struggled for all these years, scrimping and slaving to bring you up nicely so you could marry well.’

  Rachel continued to look at her. ‘Better a wedding than none. He could’ve run off and left me. He’s good, Danny is, Mom. He is.’

  Her mother seemed to pass through a moment of unbearable tension. ‘Very well,’ she snapped eventually. ‘Marry him then. You’ve made your bed – you can lie on it. But don’t expect any help from me. I’ve had enough of sacrificing myself for you.’

  Rachel watched as her mother walked self-righteously away from her in her neat winter coat, along Digbeth. Guilt and shame mingled with her hurt and anger. She wanted to cry after Peggy, ‘I’m sorry, Mom – I know you’re ashamed of me, but please don’t go! Please just stay with me and be my mom!’ And, as her tears started to come, her inner cry turned to, ‘Can’t you be nice? Can’t you think of someone except yourself – just for once?’ But within seconds, without looking back, Peggy had disappeared, merging in among the crowds along the pavement.

  Twenty-One

  On a snowy February afternoon, Rachel and Danny stood side by side in front of the altar. The church was cold and dark and outside, the sky was so low it seemed to brush the spire. Rachel had put on everything she possessed in the way of clothing under the pretty silk dress they had bought from the Rag Market, the colour of almond blossom. Even so, her feet, in a little pair of fawn court shoes, were numb with cold. She was carrying a bunch of pale cream narcissi.

  Peggy had softened enough to let her come into the house and collect some of her things.

  ‘I can’t have you here for long,’ she said, tight-lipped at the door. ‘You must understand that.’

  ‘I’m getting married,’ Rachel told Peggy haughtily. ‘So I wouldn’t be here anyway.’

  She packed her clothes and a few belongings and defiantly took her leave. But she felt so miserable getting on the bus along the Coventry Road, her mother’s only positive words, thrown at her back, being, ‘You might as well let me know when the wedding is.’

  Rachel was surprised to realize just how happy Gladys was to have her moving in. She had lost Jess and Amy. Nancy reported that though there was still a long way to go – Amy was still wetting the bed – the sisters were happier and more settled out there than they had ever been in Aston. As well as feeling that she had let them down Gladys was happy to have another girl in the house.

  ‘If it wasn’t for your mother I’d’ve said wait a bit until you get married,’ she told Rachel. ‘Just to be sure. But now . . .’

  ‘But we want to get wed anyway, Auntie,’ Danny protested. He was all for it, eager as a puppy, as if it was just the thing he had been waiting for.

  Gladys gave him a tight-lipped look, as if to say, You’ve no idea, son. ‘But now you’re here,’ she went on, ‘I’d best go and see the vicar and get the banns read. Get things done proper. And Danny – until you’re wed, Rachel’ll sleep in the room next to me. You stay up in the attic.’ She gave him a fierce, meaningful look.

  ‘All right, Auntie,’ Danny said.

  ‘And you can wipe that grin off yer face an’ all, lad,’ Gladys retorted.

  And now, without too much fuss, the day had arrived.

  ‘I now pronounce you man and wife.’ The vicar smiled valiantly at them, as if trying to chase an expression of sceptical doubt away from his features.

  We must look like children to him, Rachel thought, feeling the strangeness of the brass ring which Danny had bought, encircling her finger. We aren’t much more. And he’s probably guessed that I’m in the family way even though it doesn’t show. A blush of shame spread across her cheeks, but she smiled up at Danny, so smart today in a suit. His blue eyes met hers and he looked happy and fizzing with excitement. He took her hand.

  ‘Wife,’ he whispered, in amazement. ‘You’re mine
now. Mrs Booker. Family.’

  Behind them, on one side of the aisle stood Gladys, in a grey woollen dress with a spray of red silk roses pinned above her left breast, and Dolly Morrison – who would always go to a wedding, given the chance – in a fuchsia-pink frock and teetering navy high heels. On the other was Peggy, alone apart from Cissy, who kept calling Rachel’s name. She stood very upright, wearing a smart navy coat and hat, with an air of trying to rise above everything that was going on.

  They did not have an organist or any hymns. Two lit candles on the altar gave the only light apart from pale daylight falling through the windows. Afterwards, they trooped quietly back down the aisle, this tiny wedding party, and stood just inside the church, the freezing wind gusting in through the open door. Rachel held Cissy and made a fuss of her. Peggy had dressed her up very nicely in a little pea-green wool coat and hat and her plump cheeks were rubbed pink from the wind.

  ‘Waych!’ Cissy kept saying excitedly. Rachel melted with fondness at the sight of her. She was going to miss living with her baby sister.

  ‘This is Danny,’ Rachel told her. Cissy beamed.

  ‘Danny!’ she cried, clapping her hands.

  Danny laughed. ‘She’s got my name better than yours.’

  ‘She can’t say her r’s yet,’ Rachel laughed. ‘Can you, Ciss?’

  ‘I remember you from the market,’ Gladys was saying to Peggy.

  ‘Oh, that was a long while back,’ Peggy replied dismissively.

  Rachel saw Gladys sizing her mother up. She observed the strength in Gladys, her determination not to be talked down to. Rachel felt, once again, very annoyed with her mother. When it came down to it, Peggy and Gladys did exactly the same sort of work. Why did Mom always have to act as if she was so superior?

  ‘Well,’ Gladys said, ‘whatever we might think, these two’re man and wife now. You’re our Danny’s mother-in-law and you’re welcome in our house whenever you’d like to visit. In fact we’re going back there to toast the pair of ’em now, if you want to join us.’

  ‘I see,’ Peggy said. ‘No, I don’t think . . .’

  Rachel could see she was extremely uncomfortable with Gladys’s directness and everything else about her. She had started referring to Gladys as ‘that gypsy woman’.

  ‘And you can come if you want to visit your daughter and your grandchild, when it arrives,’ Gladys went on bluntly. ‘Unless they’re welcome at yours.’

  ‘We’ll have to see.’ Peggy spoke resentfully. ‘You seem to have taken over everything,’ she added. ‘I can’t see that I shall be needed. I think I’d better be going now.’ She turned and started out, down the church steps.

  ‘Mom!’ Rachel said, hurrying after her, suddenly close to tears. This was her wedding day after all. And she was still holding Cissy, as Peggy realized when she reached the pavement and had to stop. ‘Don’t be like that with Auntie . . .’ She held her sister tight as Peggy went to wrench Cissy from her arms. Cissy began to squawk in protest.

  ‘Auntie?’ Peggy said savagely, hauling Cissy away from her. ‘Since when has that woman been any auntie of yours?’ Once again she was about to walk off.

  ‘When will I see you?’ Rachel said. She felt cold and low now. Was this how it was always going to be? And today, when she needed her mother to be with her, to be on her side, Peggy had spoiled everything.

  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 j
ust 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.