War Babies Read online

  Rachel skipped back and forth between her mother’s pitch and Danny’s, sucking the barley sugar Gladys offered her and standing beside Danny, hoping everyone would think they were running the comic business together. She had not bought anything from Danny lately because she was saving her farthings to buy a present each for Mom and Danny for Christmas. The trouble was she only had a penny halfpenny even now and there didn’t seem much you could buy with that. She noticed that Danny, like his aunt, seemed especially distant today and his shouting had a harsh, angry edge to it. She wondered if she had done something wrong.

  ‘Get yer comics here!’ he bawled into the general racket, ignoring her. ‘Get yer Christmas comics – two for a farthing!’

  The price had gone down as the day waned, Rachel noticed. Darkness had fallen and the place was lit up now that it was getting on for closing time. Cigarette smoke tingled in her nostrils. She shivered under her jumper. Her feet in her little boots felt like blocks of ice, but she didn’t care. Gazing round at all the animated faces in the crowds, at Danny, his swaggering way of standing, his voice singing out, she was full of happiness – even if Danny was in a mood. She loved the decorations and the feeling of Christmas coming. And life was so much better than when Mom had just been slaving away on her own!

  And then it happened. She didn’t see it coming. She was standing near Gladys and Danny. The man was just another stranger, burly, in dark clothes like all the other men, pushing through the crowd. She couldn’t tell that he was drunk and in a rage. Shoving his way through, he was suddenly upon them.

  Afterwards she did not know what happened first. Rachel saw the man’s wide fleshy face, thick, dark brows under his cap, a merciless expression. Gladys’s voice shrieked, ‘Oh no, you don’t – you get away from ’ere, you bullying sod you!’ And Danny, who saw him too late, twisted round and tried to duck away. But the man seized him by one ear, yanking cruelly at it.

  ‘You – come with me, yer little rat . . .’ he slurred. ‘You’re coming along with me – now.’

  In those seconds she could see Danny was in pain and that he was trying not to cry out. He was helpless as the man twisted his ear, then grabbed him by the arm.

  Gladys shot out from behind her wares and was game to fight the man with all she had. ‘He’s staying with me –’ She started punching his chest, pulling on him, but he was so big, he just shoved her away.

  ‘Get off, you meddling bitch . . .’

  All in seconds, as Gladys staggered backwards and other people around exclaimed in protest, Danny was disappearing with the man across the market, squirming and struggling, but defeated. The two of them merged with the crowd and disappeared.

  Gladys stood watching, panting, hands on her waist, a terrible bitter expression on her face. Rachel was rocked to the core, seeing Danny like that. In the seconds as the man grabbed him, she saw an anguished, despairing look cross Danny’s face. He was suddenly young. Very young and scared. Her legs were shaking.

  ‘Who was that?’ she asked Gladys, her voice trembling.

  Still staring across the market, Gladys said, ‘That’s his father. Married to my sister. Poor cow. Was, that is.’ Gladys sagged then. ‘’Er’s just passed away, Wednesday. Heaven help them all.’ Her voice crumbled. She drew a clenched fist into her body, as if to quell a spasm of pain, and she turned away shaking her head. Rachel knew she could not ask any more.

  Every time she went to the market from then on she looked for Danny. Nothing was the same without him and she could not shake off the memory of his face that day, the helpless fear in his eyes. His mom had died and he had not said a word. Her heart turned leaden at the thought of it.

  ‘Is Danny coming back?’ she asked Gladys once or twice. Gladys’s strong faced filled with anguish. ‘They’ve gone away, that’s all I know. As for them coming back – I don’t know, bab. I really don’t.’

  II

  Five

  May 1938

  ‘So – here is our new home.’

  Rachel raised her head, resentfully, at Peggy’s triumphant announcement. After following her mother with dragging feet from the bus stop on the Coventry Road, she found herself in front of a shop with a sign over the door which read, in curling script, HORTON’S DRAPERS & HABERDASHERS.

  ‘We’ll be living upstairs, over the shop,’ Peggy said as they hesitated outside with their bags and bundles. Her voice was purring with excitement. ‘It’s quite roomy and Fred’s got it very nice up there.’

  Rachel looked up at the sizeable brick terrace, its gables decorated with ornate, bottle-green barge-boards. Like every other house in the city it was dusted with soot. But the windows looked newly washed and reflected the morning sun. Compared with the houses they had lived in so far, it was a step up indeed.

  Only at this moment, though, as they stood in the warm spring air, did Rachel take in fully what this meant, what Peggy’s wedding yesterday to a man called Fred Horton – at the big church, St Cyprian’s in Hay Mills – implied. It meant that both of them had to change their names. That Rachel had to leave her school, leave the neighbourhood. Mom had only told her a week ago.

  Rachel, now twelve, dressed in her best Sunday frock, turned her face upwards with a stony expression.

  ‘I don’t want to live here,’ she muttered. ‘I don’t like it. I want to go home!’ She felt helpless, as if she had been tricked.

  ‘What d’you mean?’ Peggy laughed. There were new, happy lines on her pale face. ‘Of course you want to live here. Look at it – after the other ratholes we’ve been in! This is my chance for some life. A new start – and nothing’s going to get in the way of it – not you, nor anyone else . . . Now don’t you go making trouble for me, or . . .’ Whatever she was going to say, it died on her lips as the shop door swung open.

  ‘There you are at last, Peggy, my dear!’

  Fred Horton was a man of barely more than five feet tall, his mouth beaming pink under a clipped moustache, gingery-brown hair slicked back on each side of a middle parting, freckled cheeks, pink and bunched like tiny plums under his ginger-lashed eyes.

  ‘Come in – come in!’ He gave a silly little bow and his jacket swung open to display a tightly fitting weskit beneath, and a watch chain. ‘Your home, my dear!’ There was something aged about Fred Horton. Although in his forties, seven years Peggy’s senior, he seemed very old to Rachel. Old and peculiar and stinking of tobacco. She wrinkled her nose at the very look of him.

  ‘Fred – yes, here we are, with our few chattels,’ Peggy said in a jolly tone. It felt to Rachel as if they were being taken in like beggars, taken pity on. But of course her mother was now this man’s wife. And she had a stepbrother seven years her senior, who she had disliked on sight. It felt strange and all wrong. ‘Come along now, Rachel. This is our new home, thanks to Fred.’

  ‘We’ll take your things upstairs,’ Fred instructed. He had put on an expansive air, as if showing them around a palace on behalf of the king. ‘We don’t want to clutter up the vestibule.’

  They passed along the hall and Rachel glimpsed the shop through the first door to the left. The stairs led straight up in front of them, covered with a runner of moss-green carpet. Soon they were on a narrow landing.

  ‘There’s a small storeroom downstairs, and the back kitchen. We conduct most of our life upstairs, though,’ Fred told them. Rachel looked the other way as he talked. Why should she be interested? And Mom had already been round the house, though she seemed happy to be shown it all again and exclaim over it as if she was seeing it for the first time, which just seemed silly.

  ‘Our room will be at the front of the house, Peggy dear.’ Fred spoke in a voice that made Rachel shudder. Already she loathed him, for existing, for marrying her mother. ‘We’ll save that one for later. Now – this is the parlour.’ They peeped into what might once have been a bedroom, in the middle of the house, with a narrow window overlooking the yard at the back. It was a glum-looking place. The floor was covered in brown linoleum
. To one side, dark brown leather chairs were arranged stiffly around a little lead fireplace; to the other, away from the window, was a gateleg table with no covering on it and four chairs, squeezed up towards one corner. It felt chill, even in the spring weather. The only thing on the narrow mantelshelf was a photograph of what seemed to be Fred, standing beside a woman in a wedding dress. The woman was not Rachel’s mother.

  ‘You see, Peggy,’ Fred said. ‘The place is badly in need of a woman’s touch. Our little daily only does the very basics. But now you’re here, my dear.’

  Rachel saw one of his stumpy, freckled hands move across her mother’s back. Fred leaned in and pressed his lips to his new wife’s cheek. He was barely half an inch taller than Peggy. Rachel felt herself shrink inside. She felt alone, as if there was no one else with her in the world. She didn’t want some strange, freckly man laying his hands on her mother.

  But there was nothing she could say. Peggy was quite closed off to her. There was no choice. They were to live in this house, owned by Fred Horton, whose business, ‘Horton’s Drapers & Haberdashers’, was thriving on the Coventry Road. During the past three years Peggy had moved out of the ‘hovel’ as she called it, in Floodgate Street, to a bigger – though still small – terrace in Bordesley, not too far from the markets. That had not been a rathole. It was ordinary enough, and Rachel had liked it. But now Peggy was onto greater things. She was going up in the world, to comfort and security, to the station in life she felt she was due and with a man to look after her. But Rachel would have done anything to stay in that little house with Mom and Mom alone – even if her mother was often harsh and unhappy.

  Peggy had met Fred Horton in his shop. One day, as she was in the area looking to buy clothes, she had gone into Horton’s to see if he had any remnants for sale which would suit her to make up into garments. She was a good seamstress and had had a lot of success selling her own clothes. That was how it started. Fred’s first wife Alice had died a year earlier and he was on the lookout. Within three months the two of them were engaged – but not before Peggy had been introduced to this house and all that went with it. And she had not said a word to Rachel – not until the last minute.

  ‘He’s got a maid!’ she’d said, excited. ‘Imagine!’ Harold Mills had never run to domestic help. Now Peggy knew why – all his money was being sucked off elsewhere.

  The dark corridor seemed to Rachel to stretch for a very long way between the front and back of the house. After the parlour Fred Horton showed them a bathroom – with running water! Peggy exclaimed with excitement again.

  Stairs turned off the landing to another floor. ‘The attic – that’s where my son Sidney’s going to be now. He’s moved out of his room specially to give it to you, you see.’

  And as they progressed to the back of the house, Fred announced, ‘And here’s where you’ll sleep, little Sally!’

  ‘Rachel, dear,’ Peggy corrected. ‘Not Sally.’

  ‘Rachel. I do beg your pardon.’ Fred turned in the passage, forcing them all to stop rather abruptly. ‘Rachel – of course. I don’t know why, but you look just like a Sally to me.’

  Rachel withered further inside. She did not trust his oily apology. She wanted to run outside into the sunshine, to run away, back home – except home had gone. There was nowhere she could run to. She made a face at Fred’s back.

  ‘Here we are – this is all yours,’ Fred said, opening the door grandly.

  The room was tiny, barely bigger than a boxroom. At that moment it was advantageously bathed in sunlight, the one thing which gave it a cheerful look. The bed was to the right of the door, though there was nothing on it but a mattress covered in dusty-looking ticking. Along the left wall next to the door was a dark wooden chest of drawers with a tatty white crocheted mat on it. The floorboards were bare, except for a square offcut of brown carpet by the bed.

  ‘We’ll soon get your bed made up,’ Peggy said, cajoling as she saw Rachel’s mutinous face. The sunlight could not disguise the stained distemper and smell of damp in the room. But it wasn’t the room she minded – that was certainly no worse than other rooms she had slept in – it was that she didn’t want any room in this house, with this man who she did not like.

  ‘But it’s so far away,’ she whispered. She reached for her mother’s hand, but Peggy shook her off as they followed Fred Horton’s dumpy figure.

  ‘Oh, our room’s only just along here,’ Peggy said in a determinedly cheerful voice. ‘Not far away at all. And you’re a big girl now – you don’t need to sleep near me, do you?’

  That Sunday they spent unpacking their few belongings. Rachel’s took up very little space in the dark chest of drawers. She went to look out at the back, wondering if there was a garden, but there was nothing but a scrubby brick yard with weeds pushing up between the cracks.

  In the evening the four of them sat at the table in the parlour above the shop. Rachel’s feet did not touch the floor and the seat of her chair had sunk in its frame so that she felt as if she was sitting on a lavatory. Fred was at one end of the table and Peggy the other. Opposite Rachel was Sidney Horton. He was nineteen years old, with the same looks as his father, muddy red hair and eyes which Rachel hardly saw throughout the meal because he never looked up for long enough. His brow was clenched in a permanent frown. He worked at Webster & Horsfall’s, the wire factory in Hay Mills. He was silent and graceless and ate with loud slapping, squelching sounds, paying no attention to Rachel, as if she wasn’t there, which suited her well enough because she wished she wasn’t. But his smell wafted over to her, sweaty, metallic and alien.

  The meal, which ‘Ettie’ the maid had evidently cooked, was of rubbery liver and onions and boiled potatoes which had gone grey. Rachel saw her mother trying to look as if this meal was satisfactory, enjoyable even, but it was a struggle. No one needed to say much because Fred Horton could talk the hind leg off any animal you put in front of him and on his very favourite subject, broadly speaking: himself.

  Peggy, at rare intervals in Fred Horton’s endless flow of talk, tried to involve her new stepson in conversation.

  ‘I hear you’re doing very well at the wire factory,’ she said to Sidney.

  Sidney, his mouth full, nodded and grunted in reply.

  ‘A great firm,’ Fred said. ‘They made the first transatlantic cable – thirty thousand miles of it. Think of that!’ He seemed considerably more impressed with this than Sidney himself did.

  ‘I always think it’s marvellous to be apprenticed somewhere very good like that and to move up through the firm,’ Peggy said, trying hard. ‘It gives you such a firm base.’

  ‘I wasn’t apprenticed,’ Sidney said, with obvious hostility.

  ‘Just a factory hand, I’m afraid,’ Fred said.

  Rachel saw Sidney look directly at her mother for the first time, with an insolent stare. Chewing slowly, he emptied his mouth, then said, ‘So, you’re a market trader?’

  Rachel felt her stomach lurch at the tone of his voice. She knew how much Mom loathed rudeness. She pushed the tough bits of liver round her plate. The sharp tone of Peggy’s reply was unmistakeable.

  ‘I have a little business, yes – as a wardrobe dealer.’

  ‘Had Peggy, had,’ Fred insisted. ‘But those days are over now.’

  ‘I had a good little business,’ Peggy defended herself. ‘I built it all up myself.’

  ‘Oh, very fine – of course,’ Fred laughed, humouring her. ‘But you can put all that behind you now. Peggy’s a fine little seamstress and buyer. She can make up things to sell – and on some days she’ll help me in the shop.’

  ‘Funny,’ Sidney said, looking insolently round the table. ‘I remember my mother saying that the market people were rough as dirt – nothing better than gypsies.’ He turned his sludgy eyes on his father. ‘I don’t remember you disagreeing with her.’

  There were frozen seconds of silence.

  ‘That’s enough of that,’ Fred ordered. Rachel saw that her mot
her’s face was flushed with fury and she was pressing her lips together. ‘No more of that talk.’ To Peggy he said, ‘Alice didn’t know much about the work – the noble work – of the markets. She’d led rather a sheltered life.’

  ‘But they are a bunch of gyppos, aren’t they?’ Sidney said, addressing his remaining potatoes with a suppressed snigger. ‘Everyone says so.’

  Rachel heard her mother’s voice snake across the table, low with rage. ‘I’ll thank you to find some manners and not keep on about things you know nothing about. I’ll have you know, I’ve been perfectly capable of earning my own living and I’ll do so again if necessary. No one’s doing me any favours, young man, and don’t you forget it.’

  Rachel’s heart was banging hard. She kept her head down, wondering what on earth was coming next.

  ‘Leave the table, Sidney.’ Fred’s voice was heavy with anger as well. ‘And don’t come back unless you can find yourself some manners. Go on!’ he shouted, as Sidney showed no signs of moving. ‘You’re old enough to know better than to talk to a lady like that. And this lady is my wife, so you’d better get used to it, or you can find somewhere else to hang your hat!’

  Sidney got up slowly, smirking.

  ‘Go on – get out, you idle little bugger!’ Fred bawled at him. His son slouched from the room and slammed the door.

  There was a terrible silence. Rachel’s blood was thudding. She had never heard such shouting and carry-on in her own home. She stared into her lap, her fingers clasped round the tassels of the pale green chenille tablecloth. She heard Fred move his chair back.

  ‘I’m sorry, Peggy,’ he said, sounding very contrite as he moved round the table to her. Rachel was surprised by the gentleness of his voice.

  ‘I won’t be spoken to like that!’ Peggy snapped. ‘We need to start as we mean to go on.’ Rachel could hear that she was close to tears as well. She tilted her head to look at her mother and saw that she was quivering with emotion. Fred Horton was leaning over her, his arm round her shoulders.