by Annie Murray
Melly could see the boys outside and she rushed to the door. After those horrible ladies her senses were alert for trouble. The group of lads had gathered right up close to the shop now and they were all round Tommy, jeering and elbowing each other.
Melly froze on the shop step. There were three boys, but to her they felt like a huge crowd. They were bigger than her, older, twelve or thirteen, and she did not recognize them – one ginger, two mouse-haired – nothing special about them. They were egging each other on, shouting and braying. Two of them had hold of the chair.
‘Look at this cripple carriage! It’s a go-kart! Come on, let’s see how fast it goes!’
‘Want a ride, do yer?’ the third shouted right in Tommy’s face. They grabbed the arms of the chair and jostled it away from the wall. Melly saw Tommy’s face. His pale, usually sweet features were frozen in helpless terror.
‘Race yer. Look at ’im – ’e can’t even talk!’
Melly felt as if she was going to explode. There was no time to think, she just started shouting. ‘Stop it! Stop it – that’s my brother. Gerroff him – you’re hurting him!’
They were shaking the chair, rocking it from side to side. Tommy was spluttering, trying to say something and struggling in the chair. She could see he was terrified that they were going to charge down the street with it and tip him out. His eyes were dark and enormous. She ran round the boys, shouting and trying to get hold of the chair. One of them elbowed her viciously. Winded, a sharp pain in her chest, she reeled away, her rubber shoes slipping on the cobbles so that she almost fell.
‘Help!’ she shouted, crying now. ‘They’re hurting my brother!’
People began to take in what was happening: the boys’ jeering, their nasty expressions, the way they had pulled the chair away from the wall, fighting between each other to have control over it. Melly saw a man set out across the street towards them, an arm raised.
But before he could get there, another figure hurled itself into the fray, someone who appeared to Melly like a rushing whirlwind of salvation. A blonde-haired lad, bigger than any of the three bullies, flung himself at them.
‘Get off of ’im!’ he bawled. He hauled them back from Tommy’s chair, giving one of them such a shove that he landed on his backside in the gutter, face gurning with pain. ‘You get off – leave ’im alone! What’s ’e ever done to you, yer cowing little buggers?’
This avenging lightning streak, Melly now saw to her amazement, was Dolly’s third son Reggie Morrison. Reggie was nearly seven years older than her and she remembered him playing with her when they were much smaller, pushing her about in a little cart when she could barely walk, and playing marbles. But Reggie was so grown up now at the grand age of sixteen that he had nothing to do with her these days.
The third boy attempted to fight back, but Reggie seized him by the shoulders and shoved him up against the wall.
‘Wanna fight me, do yer?’ he demanded, pushing his face close up to him. The boy shook his head. The second lad, having been pushed away, hovered about, looking as if he was considering running away.
‘Hey – lads, lads!’ The man from across the road had now reached them, still holding his arm up as if directing the traffic.
Reggie stood, hands on hips, panting. He was usually the quietest of the Morrison boys, the one you didn’t notice. But he seemed taller now, wirily strong, his blue eyes fierce, eyebrows pulled into the frown of a man who meant serious business.
‘Calm down,’ the older bloke said, putting a hand on Reggie’s shoulder. But Reggie shook him off as if to say, look, it’s me that’s done the work around here. He wiped his arm across his forehead and glanced at his right hand which he seemed to have grazed.
‘You lot,’ the man shouted at the already fleeing group of boys. ‘You just clear off!’
Melly, still trembling with the shock of it all, went to Tommy, who had started to let out big gulping sobs. Tommy didn’t cry often. When he did he found it hard to breathe.
‘Tommy?’ She put a hand on his shoulder, close to tears herself. She wanted to thank Reggie Morrison but she couldn’t seem to bring out a word.
Reggie was still standing in front of Tommy, elbows jutting out, hands on his waist.
‘You’re all right, mate,’ he told him. ‘They’ve gone now. They won’t be coming back.’
Tommy looked at him, his little face straining and wet with tears, in too much of a state to say anything back.
‘You’re all right, Tommy – no need to blart,’ Reggie said again, sounding like a man. Turning, he adjusted his shoulders and took off up the road.
Melly watched him in wonder: the strong set of him, his straight back, the wide shoulders and confident stride. She saw Reggie as if for the first time; saw what a man meant. Something soft and yearning budded inside her. Reggie. She tried the name in her head. Reggie Morrison.
Melly was crying so much herself by the time she got the chair back into the yard that she hardly had the strength to push it inside the house. Tommy was still bawling and the commotion brought their mother groggily downstairs. She stood clutching the ends of her cardigan round her.
‘What the hell’s the matter with the pair of you?’
It was a while before Melly could get the words out. It was her fault. All of it. She spilled out the story.
‘I wanted to help,’ she wept. ‘I went to get the bread and rations and . . .’ A terrible thought struck her. She’d forgotten the shopping! What if someone else had taken it – there was hardly any food to be had, Mom was always saying so! Panic rattled around in her head.
‘Well, where is it?’ Rachel asked.
‘I never . . . I mean, there were these boys and they were going for Tommy – trying to turn his chair over and I ran out and . . . and then Reggie . . .’
Rachel drew a chair from the table to sit down, her face hardening with fury. ‘Who – who were they?
‘I d-don’t know. They weren’t from up this end. . . Reggie came and stopped them but I never went back to get the things from Mrs Bra – acken.’ The last word was interrupted by a hiccough.
‘Never mind Mrs Bracken – she’ll keep it for us. But those lads – the rotten little sods – if I ever get hold of them . . . C’m’ere, Tommy. It’s all right, babby. No one’s going to hurt you.’
Melly watched as her mother leaned in and unstrapped Tommy. Even though he was seven now, she pulled him on to her lap, cuddling her distraught little boy. Melly wished Mom would cuddle her as well.
‘I never meant—’ she said.
‘I know you never meant,’ Rachel said harshly. She sounded so furious and unforgiving that Melly shrank inside. It was as if she had committed a crime. ‘But you should never’ve taken him. Oh, God . . .’ Rachel was speaking as if to herself, her face raised towards the cracked ceiling. ‘What’re we going to do?’ After a moment she turned to Melly.
‘Well, go on.’ There was no softness in her voice. ‘You’ll have to go back and get the bits from Mrs Bracken, won’t you?’
Melly slunk out into the yard, pulling her sleeves across her eyes. She didn’t feel like crying now. Leaving Mom cuddling Tommy she went along the entry, frozen with misery. Reggie had saved them! Mom didn’t seem interested in that. But she couldn’t stop thinking about Reggie and those blazing blue eyes of his. She thought Reggie was amazing.
After that, Tommy refused to be taken out anywhere. He was content to go into the yard where everyone knew him. But if Rachel said she was going to take him out, his little body would start to sway this way and that like a sapling in the wind and he’d get all worked up.
‘No!’ he would mouth, getting more and more panic-stricken. ‘Not going – no – stay here!’
Melly could not rid herself of a heavy feeling of wrongdoing. It was all her fault – she had taken Tommy out and this had happened. She had been trying to do something good and it had all gone wrong. She took it completely to heart. As Tommy’s big sister, she had always been th
e one to teach him and to look after him, ever since he was tiny. Mom relied on her – she always had. Looking after Tommy, she had come to believe, was what she was for.
Two
‘I saw this little lad with his arse hanging out of his trousers,’ Rachel would relate, a mischievous but fond twinkle in her eye. ‘You could hear him right across the market, yelling his flaming head off, selling his comics. Some of them were so old they almost fell to bits in your hand! That was your dad – always up to something. I fell in love with him there and then.’
Melly knew that her mom and dad, Rachel and Danny, had fallen in love very young. They often told the story of how they had met on the Rag Market when Nanna Peggy, Rachel’s mother, had a pitch there.
Whenever Mom told this story, when they were sitting round having Sunday tea or some such, Auntie Gladys would shift a bit in her chair, pulling her shawl round her, making her face at Dad which meant she was pretending to be hard done by and say, ‘That was before I was landed with him day in, day out, the cheeky little sod. Heaven knows what I did to deserve that.’
A boyish grin would stretch across Dad’s face and he’d look from one to the other of them, tweak his cigarette from his mouth between the V of his fingers, blow out a lungful of smoke and say, ‘Clapping eyes on me was the best day of both your lives, weren’t it?’
Melly and her brothers had all grown up living with their mom, dad and auntie Gladys. Gladys, a widow, had lived in the yard for over twenty years. She was a strong, striking-looking woman in her fifties with a blade-like nose and piercing blue eyes. She had worked on the city’s Rag Market for years as a ‘wardrobe dealer’ selling second-hand clothes. Although she could tease him about it now, Danny had come to be in her care for very sad reasons. When Gladys’s sister, Danny’s mother, died, Danny’s father couldn’t – and didn’t want to – cope with his four children. He delivered Danny and his sisters into separate orphanages. Gladys tried to find out where they were, but she never did know where they had gone and as there was no love lost between her and Danny’s father, he wouldn’t tell her. It was only when Danny reached fourteen years of age and was able to work that he got out and came to find Gladys, who took him in. Though he found two of his sisters later, they were never really a family again and they had made their own lives outside the city. Rachel and Danny had married young and had lived with Gladys in her tiny, but spick-and-span, house ever since.
Melly had never lived anywhere other than this yard, down an entry off Alma Street in Aston. She heard people talking about what a state the place was in, thanks to Hitler and his bombs. But she was born just as the worst of the blitz on Birmingham began. She could not remember it any other way than it was now.
Hitler had certainly done his part and the district was pocked with damage, bomb pecks and water-filled craters, gaps along the rows of houses and factories, still full of rubble and now strewn with weeds. Some of these made cut-throughs from street to street. Children played in them, hunting for shrapnel, mimicking spies, and shooting at each other with pretend guns. But even before Hitler, Aston was an old, tightly packed industrial area of factories and warrens of leaking houses, their very brickwork eaten away by the industrial effluvia in the air and black with soot from thousands of chimneys.
Everyone in Aston knew the smells – the hoppy blasts from Ansell’s brewery, the sour tang of vinegar from the HP Sauce factory when you walked near Aston Cross, depending on which way the wind was blowing. You might get a sniff of Windsor Street gasworks, of factory chemicals, of mouth-watering vinegary chips from one of the fried-fish shops, or the sweet inviting smell from the corner shop where the lady churned her own ice cream.
Melly knew these streets behind which were cramped yards of back-to-back houses: two houses under one roof. And most of all she knew the one court, or yard, where she had grown up.
Melly had become aware as she got a bit older that Nanna Peggy, Rachel’s mother, had never approved of the match between her mom and dad. Nanna, a proud, neat little woman, very preoccupied with her clothes and appearance, lived in Hay Mills over the haberdasher’s shop she ran with her second husband, Fred Horton. With them lived their daughter Cissy, Rachel’s much younger half-sister, who was born the day war broke out in 1939.
Peggy thought she had gone up in the world since marrying Fred and didn’t like to be reminded that she had once worked on the Rag Market as well. Nanna Peggy could be very snobby. ‘Tuppence looks down on a halfpenny,’ as Gladys said. Melly was angry with Nanna for the way she talked about Tommy, as if he didn’t matter, almost as if he wasn’t a person. In fact it was her grandmother who had first made her feel an enraged sense of protection towards Tommy. She talked about him being a ‘spastic’ or a ‘cripple’, about having Tommy ‘put away’ somewhere. Melly had never forgiven Nanna Peggy for that. None of them went to see her very often these days.
When Melly looked after Tommy and helped Mom, everyone said she was a good girl. Looking after people was the thing you were supposed to do. Tommy was a ‘cripple’ – as some people said – who needed looking after. He needed his big sister to teach him things and help him. And Melly had seen close up what it meant when people didn’t look after each other. She had seen Evie Sutton who lived across the yard.
Evie was born just after Tommy in 1943. Irene, her mother, wanted a boy. Ray, her husband, threatened to leave if she didn’t give him a boy. Lo and behold, she had a girl. Ray didn’t leave – he stayed and got drunk as usual. Although Irene already had two daughters, she couldn’t seem to stand the sight of Evie. Sometime after Evie was born, Melly overheard, in the yard gossip, that Irene had been very poorly and ‘had it all taken away’. Melly had no idea what this meant except that there was not, apparently, going to be any boy to follow Evie – or any girl either.
Melly knew her mother kept an eye out for Evie – everyone did. Evie was an odd child. You’d come across her at the end of the yard somewhere, pulling a worm out of a patch of rough ground and muttering to it. She was very pretty, blonde like her mother with huge blue eyes. But the other children, even though they felt sorry for her, also found her smelly and annoying. Her sisters were mean to her. She was never clean, always a whiff about her. And she was always, always after something, wanting to play your games, come into your house, sit on your knee or whatever it was but it was always too much and people ended up shooing her away.
‘That’s enough now, Evie – go on, stop mithering me – buzz off.’
But the glimpses Melly had had of the inside of Irene and Ray’s house, the bare walls, the dirt, the miserable-looking table with spilt milk and crumbs all over it, the scuttling bugs, gave her the shivers. Auntie Gladys’s house was jerry-built just the same, but she worked hard to make sure it was decorated and clean inside.
Gladys had been a rock in all their lives. Melly thought of her as her other grandmother even though everyone called her Auntie. And Dolly and Mo and their family at number one had shown Gladys the staunchest of support through good times and bad. Their boys were part of the scenery, of all that was familiar. As were the other neighbours, sour Ethel Jackman with her silent husband, and dear old Lil Gittins at number five, caring for her shell-shocked husband Stanley. Melly felt happy to live in this yard, amid these streets with their factories, their neighbourliness, their grime, their harshness. It would never have occurred to her to think of living anywhere else. Her school was just along the road, all the family she most cared about were here. It was Alma Street – it was her world. And Tommy was her world as well.
Three
‘Oh, no, I knew it, God help me!’ Rachel leaned against the scullery door as her body clenched in a powerful contraction. ‘Oh, why couldn’t it come when there was school?’
Her face contorted and the muscles in her arms knotted tight. Her words were followed by a helpless moan of pain.
A queasy feeling grew inside Melly. Her mother was bent forward, her head bowed, dark hair twisted up and pinned roughly behi
nd her head. A moment later she straightened up with a desperate gasp.
‘Oh, no!’ It was a sob.
To her horror, Melly saw a creeping pool of liquid move across the floor from her mother’s feet. Rachel grabbed a rag and frantically wiped her legs. Melly’s sick feeling grew. Had Mom wet herself? Not Mom, surely? She had never seen her mother like this before. She knew it was the baby but she didn’t know what to do. When Kev was born she had been safely asleep in bed with Auntie here and Dad and a midwife.
‘It’s coming,’ Rachel panted. ‘Melly, go and get Dolly quick – tell her I’m having it!’
Gladys was out at church and Dad nowhere around either. Melly ducked her head against the rain pelting down into the yard.
‘Eh, bab, where’s the fire?’ Dolly Morrison joked as Melly hurtled in through the door of number one. Dolly was at the table, with Donna. Three of her lads were crouched round the fire, cuffing each other for something to do on a soaking-wet Sunday morning.
‘It’s Mom, she says can you come she’s having it!’ Melly babbled, still only half understanding that ‘it’ was the new babby Mom had said was on its way.
‘Oh, my word –’ Dolly leapt up. ‘Come on, princess – you come with me.’ Little Donna, seated at the table, was five now. Dolly scooped her up and dashed for the door. Melly followed.
‘Rach?’ Dolly took one look inside the door of number three. ‘Melly, go back and tell one of the lads to run for the midwife – get Reggie to go, he’s more chance of finding the way.’
Melly stalled for a moment. Her, order Reggie, who was six years older than her and had already left school, out into the rain! She wouldn’t have minded asking Jonny or Freddie, the younger boys who were fourteen and twelve. But since Reggie had come to her rescue with Tommy the other day, she had started to feel a sort of awe for him, although he never took any notice of her. She was just a little squirt and a girl so far as Reggie was concerned, wasn’t she? How could she tell Reggie what to do! But she ran back to number one, heart pumping even harder now.