by Annie Murray
Dolly rolled her eyes. ‘That sounds like any other day to me.’ She and Gladys smiled. Rachel was sitting beside Tommy to help him enjoy the party. No one mentioned Danny. What was there to say that they had not already said? She looked across at Gladys. Beneath the smiling and celebration, she could still see the tension bunched up in her.
‘Cissy, Melly,’ she whispered. ‘Offer round some of the cake.’
Cissy looked very reluctant and Rachel realized that her little sister really needed to come over more often. She was shut up in that flat with their mother and Fred far too much. Melly was used to the Morrison boys. She got up and took a plate of cake round, bossing them about. ‘Only one bit, Eric . . .’
They sat enjoying the spread and reminiscing about the war, some of which, now it was all over, took on the memory of an adventure – the nights in the shelters, the wreckage they found when they ventured out in the mornings, all the anxious, frightening times they had lived through.
As the children ate, the noise in the room increased more and more.
‘It’s no good feeding ’em,’ Dolly said, smiling round at her bunch of now very lively lads. ‘It only gives ’em ideas.’
‘You lot,’ Mo ordered. ‘Out – go and have a run-round.’
Melanie came over to Rachel. ‘Can Cissy and me go out too? Rita and Shirl’re outside.’
‘Yes – off you go,’ Rachel said.
The room went suddenly quiet, only the adults remaining, and Tommy, still slowly eating scraps of his tea. He could feed himself well now, with his right hand.
Rachel looked at Gladys, seated at the head of the table. She was taking in shallow, nervous breaths. After a few moments, she drew herself up straighter, as if collecting herself.
‘Right,’ she said. Everyone looked at her. ‘Now all the young’uns have gone, I’d like to tell you all summat. I dain’t ask you all round here just to talk about the war.’ She got up and clicked off the wireless. It felt very quiet. Gladys laid a hand over her heart and took another breath.
‘What’s up?’ Dolly leaned forward. ‘Are you all right, Glad?’
‘I will be,’ Gladys said. ‘Only I want to tell you summat that I should’ve done years back. Rach – go upstairs for me, will you? On my bed you’ll find a little box. Bring it down for me, bab.’
Forty-Eight
This was another shock. Rachel had never had reason to go into Gladys’s bedroom before. Pushing open the door, which was always kept so firmly closed, she wondered for a second whether she was going to walk into some surprise, some secret Gladys had been keeping all these years. But what she saw, glancing around, was a simple, tidy room which Gladys had always kept as her most private place, in the way that she seemed to keep so much about herself private.
Dark blue curtains hung at the window. There was a small, rectangular rug on the floor of a Chinese design she had seen sold at the market, a dressing table with Gladys’s tortoiseshell hairbrush and comb laid on it alongside a box of talcum powder. There were a few hairpins and kirby grips lying about and several strings of coloured beads dangled over one corner of the mirror. There was a dark wardrobe, one wooden chair and the bed, covered by a spread of deep red chenille. Resting in the middle, in the slight sag of the mattress, was a cardboard shoebox, plain and battered at the corners. Not wanting Gladys to think she might be delaying to peep inside, she picked it up at once and carried it downstairs. It had a certain weight, but was not heavy.
Everyone else’s eyes fixed on it as she came in and placed it on the table in front of Gladys, resplendent in her exotic blue dress. Rachel felt her heart beating fast, as though Gladys’s nerves were catching.
‘Well,’ Gladys said, her cheeks flushed. ‘There’s a few things I want to get off my chest.’ She didn’t open the box. For a few seconds she closed her eyes and Rachel couldn’t decide whether she had suddenly changed her mind, or was perhaps praying, composing herself. At last she looked up again, across the room, not at anyone in particular.
‘It’s almost to the day, but not quite,’ she said. ‘Thirty years. It should be the nineteenth of April, not the twenty-first, but I kept it for the weekend. But on the nineteenth, last Friday, my boy would have had his thirtieth birthday.’ Seeing their uncomprehending faces, she went on: ‘April the nineteenth, nineteen sixteen, he was born. His name was Alfred John. Alfie, he always was to me. My little Alfie.’
Tears rose in Gladys’s eyes for a moment, but she wiped them swiftly away, as if to say, No, not yet – I haven’t finished.
‘Glad?’ Dolly spoke gently, but there was a hurt bewilderment in her voice. ‘You had a boy, of your own? Is that what you’re telling us? And you’ve never said, in all this time?’
Rachel felt things jolting into place in her mind. No wonder Gladys knew exactly how to care for a baby, was so fierce about holding onto family . . . She sat listening, stunned.
‘His father never saw him,’ Gladys went on. ‘We married in 1915, but by the time I had Alfie, he’d passed on.’
Immediately, everyone’s eyes turned to the faded photograph on the mantelpiece, of the pale, smiling soldier. Rachel saw Mo shake his head sorrowfully. Two of his brothers had gone away in 1915 and never come back. She noticed that the black crêpe was no longer draped around the picture. At last, perhaps, Gladys was going to talk about him.
‘Your Harry,’ Dolly said softly.
‘I know what you’re all thinking.’ Gladys’s voice was quiet and very sad. ‘And I’ve let you because – well, I couldn’t stand to talk about any of it. It was just to let you think . . .’ She paused a moment. Looking at the photograph she went on: ‘That’s not Harry. My Harry looked nothing like that. That picture’s of my brother John. There were four of us and he was the oldest – John, Mary, me and Albert. John was killed on the Somme, in 1916.’
Mo made a tutting sound and shook his head sadly. No one knew what to say. The only sound came from Tommy rattling his little toys on his tray and the distant shrieks of the children outside.
Gladys lifted the lid from the box and laid it carefully to one side. ‘This was Harry.’
She brought out a photograph and they all saw a broad-shouldered man with thick, dark hair, a bushy moustache and laughing eyes. Immediately, Rachel could see that he looked a match for Gladys in a way that the slim soldier on the mantelpiece did not. He was dressed in a suit, not an army uniform.
‘Harry never went to war – they needed him here,’ she went on. ‘He was at Kynoch’s – he knew all about the chemicals that went into the bombs. That’s where I met him. I worked there at the beginning of the war, until we married and then I got out – thank the Lord. It would’ve finished me off like it did some of the other girls. I never felt properly well when I was there and your skin’d go yellow . . . None of us felt right after a spell there. Any road, Harry and I married in September 1915. I was already expecting.’ She looked down for a second, embarrassed. ‘I’m not proud of the fact – it just . . . Well, that was how it was. That winter, we had the blackout – we had it in that war too. Harry was coming home from work and he was knocked down and killed by a tram. I’ll never know how he didn’t hear it coming. No time to say goodbye, nothing. Married five months and that was that. We were living in Erdington. We had quite a nice little house on his wages – better than this anyway.’ She glanced around the room. ‘I had to get out, of course. I couldn’t keep up the rent on my own, so I moved back in with my mother and father. Albert, my brother, was still at home – he was ten or eleven. My Alfie was born in the April. We would have been all right. I was grieving for Harry, but my mother was a good soul. She looked after Alfie and I went back to work – not at Kynoch’s, though. I couldn’t have stood it, thinking I saw Harry everywhere.’
For a moment she looked around at them, as if needing reassurance. Everyone was listening, rapt.
‘Oh, Glad,’ Dolly said.
‘Things went along all right for a bit. Then, within the year both my parents die
d. My father’s heart gave out. My mother was never the same after. She died of the Spanish influenza. If she hadn’t been so low in herself I believe to this day that she’d have withstood it – she was a strong woman, our mother.’ She was talking swiftly now, as if not wanting to dwell on those times. ‘By the end of the war there was just me and my sister Mary, with Albert and the baby. Mary was keeping us by and large. I had Alfie at home and I did outwork and bits of anything I could. We moved into a much poorer place – a little way from here. Mary was doing factory work, and Albert left school and started work at thirteen. We were getting on all right. And then it came back – the influenza. Just when we thought it was over.’
Rachel felt a cold dread grip her as Gladys spoke. She could see what was coming. Echoing through her head suddenly came a skipping rhyme from the school yard:
I had a little bird,
its name was Enza.
I opened up the window
and in-flu-enza.
‘I was the only one who never got it. Mary and Albert were very bad with it. I thought we were going to lose Mary. Alfie was all right to begin with. And then he went down with it as well. There was no money coming in. I was at my wits’ end.’
‘Oh God,’ Dolly breathed. ‘How on earth did you manage, Glad?’
Gladys kept her gaze on the table. Her face flushed. ‘I got by for a time. This and that.’
No one asked, but in that moment Rachel saw the man near the market, calling out in that nasty, familiar way, Polly. He would never forget Polly, with those eyes of hers. Polly, working to feed her sick family and keep her baby alive. Rachel felt choked with sadness. She sought out Gladys’s eyes and for a moment they exchanged a silent look. She could see that Gladys knew she remembered. And she knew that they would never speak of it.
‘I did everything I could. I had the doctor in, found the money for all that. Mary and Albert came through it. But my little Alfie . . . I was up with him day and night. But the Angel of Death wanted my little one. He breathed his last in my arms.’
Gladys reached into the box and brought out another picture. ‘Here he is. My little man.’ She laid the picture carefully on the table. ‘And these were his.’ Beside the picture she placed a soft little pair of black leather infant shoes. Finally, from the box, she brought out a locket and opened it to show a dark brown curl of hair.
‘I moved away,’ Gladys went on, ‘to the other side of town, to Ladywood. I left Mary and Albert. I never saw them, not for several years. And I never said a word – not to anyone. I thought if I opened my mouth, started telling anyone about my Harry and Alfie, I’d fall to pieces. Everyone was forever on about the war dead. My Harry was one of them, but there was no child marching for him on Empire Day, up at the front of the procession. No child left to do it . . .’ She picked up the picture of Alfie and held it up to them. Rachel saw a big-eyed child’s face, a corona of dark curls, a little lad dressed all in white. Danny, Rachel thought, with a wrench of pain inside her. God, he was so like Danny . . .
‘That was my war baby,’ Gladys said. She nodded at Rachel. ‘I know – our Danny’s the image of him, almost. Later, after Mary married Wilfred and we were back in touch, I started to help out with her kids. I’d moved over here by then to be near them. I’ve always looked out for Danny, poor lad.’ In a desolate voice she added. ‘And now he’s gone.’
Rachel heard a snuffle to her left, then the trumpeting sound of a man blowing his nose, and she realized, touched, that Mo was in a watery state, wiping his eyes. Dolly, also very emotional, hauled herself up and leaned over to embrace Gladys as she sat at the table.
‘Oh, Glad,’ she said. ‘Fancy you keeping all this in for all these years. But I’m glad you’ve told us now.’
Gladys leaned into her and closed her eyes. ‘Oh – I’m sorry,’ she said, as her own tears started to flow. ‘I just . . . All this time. I don’t know why really. I thought one day I’d tell everyone, once we were all together, Danny home, and everything right somehow . . . But now he’s gone again and I can’t bear it . . . But it was Alfie’s birthday again and I just wanted you all to know . . .’ She couldn’t manage any more words. Leaning her head on the table, as Dolly lovingly stroked her shoulder, Gladys sobbed from the bottom of her heart.
When things had calmed, they sat chatting, the room full of a gentle atmosphere of love and sympathy for Gladys.
‘I wish you’d told me, Glad,’ Dolly said, her own eyes still red from crying with her friend. ‘You didn’t have to shut it away all this time – it was nothing to be ashamed of.’
‘It was a terrible, black time,’ Gladys said. ‘I didn’t want it all dug up again, or have pictures about to remind me . . . I knew if I kept that photograph of John on the mantel, everyone would think I was a war widow and that’d be that. No more to be said. I wanted to put the past behind me. And when Mary had her family – I was very fond of those kids, Danny especially. When Wilf took them all off and wouldn’t say where – well, it was like the same thing happening again. As if they’d all died.’
Rachel ached with sadness. Did Danny have any idea what Gladys felt for him, even now? Or of what he had done to her, to all of them, by disappearing once again? Hearing Gladys’s story, she was now full of a warmth of gratitude for her own life, for her children. She reached out to stroke the soft skin of Tommy’s arm. Even though her son was not like other little boys, his body not working the way it should be, even though his prospects were not bright, here he was, alive and so lovable. And she had Melly, her sweet, solemn little girl. Despite everything, she felt overwhelmed by good fortune compared with Gladys, and grateful to Gladys for all she had given her.
As Dolly and Mo got up to leave, they said their goodbyes tenderly. Mo squeezed Gladys’s shoulder.
‘You always know where we are if you need anything, don’t yer, wench?’
Gladys nodded and smiled up at him, almost shy suddenly. ‘You’ve always been the best, Mo. I’d never leave this yard while you’re here. I don’t know what I’d’ve done without you and Dolly.’
‘See you tomorrow, bab.’ Dolly kissed Gladys and they gave each other an emotional look. ‘And don’t bottle it all up next time. We know you’re upset about Danny, both of you –’ Her troubled eyes took in Rachel as well. ‘It’s not a crime to let on, you know.’
They left, and Gladys got up and started briskly clearing the table, her back to the room. Rachel watched her, aching at all she had told them.
‘I wish you’d said, Auntie,’ she dared to begin.
‘Well, I have said now, haven’t I?’ Gladys replied. Her voice was still thick from crying. She didn’t turn round and she obviously didn’t want to talk about it any more.
‘I’ll have to get Cissy back to Mom’s,’ Rachel said. She had told Peggy she would bring Cissy back that Sunday evening in time for school the next day.
‘Yes – you go on over,’ Gladys agreed.
‘I expect Melly’ll want to come . . .’
Normally Gladys might have quibbled about spending another fare unnecessarily, but she just nodded. Rachel went to the door to call the girls inside. The sun was going down and the yard was now full of shadows, stirred up by the energetic movements of children. Cooking smells were coming from the other houses. She thought she saw a cluster of girls up at the far end.
‘Melanie, Cissy!’ she called. Two figures broke away from the little group of children down near the wire factory and moved, with seeming reluctance, along the yard. ‘I’ve got to get you home, Ciss,’ Rachel said.
‘Coming . . .’ They hurried a few steps. Then they slowed, as they reached the lamp post in the middle, then stopped. For a second Rachel thought they were trying to defy her, but then she saw that they were riveted by the sight of something. Whatever it was, it was coming along the entry and Rachel could not see from where she was standing. She stepped outside.
‘Come on, you two,’ she called, more loudly.
Cissy started to move, but Me
lanie was completely rooted to the spot.
‘Dad?’ she breathed.
Rachel felt the hard prod of her heartbeat, the way it speeded up. In the uncertain light of dusk she saw a figure come round from the entry. She noticed three things: the unkempt hair, the froth of something white in his left hand, and some other thing, tucked against the right side of his chest, something small and partly white. She, herself, could not seem to move.
‘Dad!’ Melly ran forward. ‘Dad!’ She flung herself at him, her arms around his waist.
‘Danny?’ Rachel breathed. ‘Oh my God – Danny!’ Other emotions would come later: sorrow and anger and questions would pour out. But in this moment, here he was, her Danny, and all she could feel was a huge rush of relief and joy.
‘Oh!’ Melly squealed. ‘Look, Ciss, it’s a puppy! Oh, Dad, is it ours – can we keep it?’
‘Hey, hey – steady.’ Danny squatted down and Rachel saw the little creature leap from his arms, a stumpy little white tail wagging madly as it jumped up at everyone in sight. Melanie was giggling ecstatically and Cissy came to join in. Soon all the children in the yard were crowding round the little Jack Russell.
‘He’s for you, Melly,’ Danny said. ‘And your brother, of course,’ he added.
Melanie was beside herself with excitement. ‘Oh, he’s lovely! He’s mine, Cissy! What’s his name?’
‘Patch,’ Danny said. ‘Look – on his back.’ The little dog’s face was mainly black and his body white, but for a lozenge of black fur all across his back, almost like a saddle. ‘That’s got to be his name, right?’
‘Patch!’ the girls chirruped.
‘Careful with him,’ Danny instructed. The little dog took off across the yard, the girls squealing behind him.
Danny straightened up and saw Rachel waiting, her arms folded, smiling a little in spite of herself. No matter about all the hurt, the rage, the grief, the sight of him was what she wanted, what made her smile.