by Annie Murray
‘Yes, but that was only because . . .’ A cloud of suspicion crept over Peggy’s face. ‘You’re not . . .? Right, madam – you’d better tell me the truth, right now. What’s been going on? Because if you’re in the family way, I’ll—’
‘You’ll what?’ Cissy sneered. ‘And no, I’m not, so there. But I love Teddy and he loves me and he’s going to ask you, as soon as I’m sixteen. It’s not long to wait when you love someone,’ she added. Cissy, born the day war broke out, was fast approaching her sixteenth birthday.
‘And we’ll say no, your father and I,’ Peggy declared. ‘How old is this person, anyway?’
Cissy looked down, knowing what reaction she was going to get. ‘Teddy’s thirty-four – but he’s ever so young.’
‘Thirty-four!’ Peggy erupted. ‘He’s old enough to be your father.’
Rachel was shocked at this too. This Teddy person was four years older than she was!
‘No, he’s not,’ Cissy argued. ‘My father’s old as the hills.’
‘Well, he’s old enough to know better. He’s playing with you, girl – you’re too young to see it but it’s plain as the nose on your face. I bet now he’s had his way with you you’ll never see him again.’
‘You’re wrong, Mom,’ Cissy said, sitting up straight, tear-stained but with a dignity that Rachel could only admire. ‘Teddy says he wants to come and meet you both – and you too, Rach, if you can. He wants to do things properly.’
‘Well, if that’s what he wants he’s got off to a very bad start,’ Peggy said. ‘Taking you off without a word, scheming and—’
‘It was my idea,’ Cissy said. ‘Teddy thought . . . Well, I told him . . .’ She blushed. ‘He thought it was all right, that’s all.’
Rachel managed to get a word in then. ‘How old does Teddy think you are, Ciss?’
Cissy’s blush grew deeper. She picked at a thread on the eiderdown. ‘I might’ve told him I was seventeen . . . Sort of by accident. But only to begin with – he knows how old I really am now.’
‘Oh, Ciss,’ Rachel said.
‘It’s just, he came in – when I was at work—’
‘He picked you off the counter at Woolworth’s!’ Peggy scoffed. ‘Well, that doesn’t say much for his taste, does it!’
‘He said he spotted me and I was the most terrific girl he’s ever seen. And the thing was, I liked him. He’s sweet. I thought if I said I was fifteen straight away, he’d just give me up.’
Rachel put her head in her hands for a moment, and then looked at her sister. ‘Ciss –’
Cissy looked up into her eyes, her own pleading for Rachel to be on her side.
‘You’re so young. I know I married Danny young. But it’s not always for the best.’ She glanced up at Peggy who looked as if she was getting worked up for another outburst. ‘Look – if this Teddy really wants you, he’ll wait a bit, won’t he? Let him come round and meet Mom and Fred . . .’
‘I want him to come round and meet them,’ Cissy flamed with emotion again. Rachel was surprised by her determination. Cissy had always seemed flighty before. ‘And you’ll see he’s not what you think. I will tell him and it won’t make any difference. Teddy loves me. And when I’m sixteen –’ she glowered at Peggy – ‘I want you to say we can get married.’
‘What’s he like, then?’
Rachel found an eager audience when she returned home a week later from another visit to Hay Mills. Cissy’s goings-on had been a distraction from the sad emptiness of the yard now that the Morrisons had left.
She had gone over for Sunday afternoon tea, to which, Cissy had announced, Teddy would be coming.
‘Well . . .’ She sat down at the table, enjoying the attention, all eyes fixed on her.
‘Cissy’s not getting married, is she?’ Melly asked. Her reaction had been one of complete bewilderment. Cissy was only a couple of years older than she was.
‘We’ll have to see,’ Rachel said.
‘Come on – spit it out,’ Gladys urged her. ‘What’s the bloke like?’
Rachel had started out feeling highly suspicious of what this Teddy bloke was after. She had expected him to be sinister, to have cast a spell in some way on her little sister. She was looking for a villain from the pictures, with a thin moustache and an odd, cold manner. Why would a grown man choose someone who was barely more than a schoolgirl? The whole situation seemed suspicious. But she couldn’t honestly say that he had seemed all that terrible when she met him.
‘I don’t know what I was expecting,’ she said. ‘He’s all right, I suppose. He’s called Teddy Meeks. He’s got money – or his father has. Meeks’s is in Coventry – car components – and he’s done all right for himself. Teddy works in the business.’
He had said he worked in the offices. Something to do with the accounts. He had a reasonably intelligent look about him, Rachel thought.
‘I saw the car – very swish. And he’s all-right looking. Brown hair, nice enough face. Quite ordinary really. Good manners. Seems quite a gentle sort, nothing, you know, nasty. His teeth stick out a bit. He looks a bit like a squirrel – big cardigan. Looked as if his mom had knitted it. Only he hasn’t got a mom – I remember he said she died when he was quite young.’
‘A squirrel in a cardigan,’ Danny said with a grin. ‘Doesn’t sound too much of a bounder.’
The kids all laughed, especially Kev. ‘Has he got a tail?’ he chortled.
‘Sounds like love’s young dream.’ Gladys couldn’t help her lips turning up as well. ‘Good job his name’s not Cyril.’
‘No,’ Rachel laughed. It was good to let off steam. ‘He’s really all right, I think. I could see Mom and Fred trying to ask him leading questions and find out something they could get rid of him for. But he was quite relaxed and nice with them. They didn’t even take him to task too much about the previous weekend – which they spent in Buxton, by the way – because he came along so serious about marrying Cissy. And he’s mad about her, you can see.’
‘Well, she is a looker,’ Gladys said. ‘But she’s only fifteen.’
‘I know.’ Rachel shook her head. ‘And he knows. He kept saying, “I know there’s a bit of an age gap, but we don’t seem to find that it matters.” That was the thing – the only reason you could say that any of it was wrong was that he’s twenty years older, nearly.’
‘Doesn’t seem natural,’ Danny said.
They all agreed that it didn’t seem natural, but even Peggy and Fred had not been able to find reasons just to turn Teddy Meeks away there and then.
‘So’ve they asked him to wait?’ Gladys said.
‘Well, Cissy’s mad to get married and he seems pretty keen as well. Mom and Fred didn’t exactly say they could, but . . .’
They all looked at each other. No one wanted to say it in front of the children but Rachel was thinking, if Cissy was in fact expecting a baby . . .
‘Time’ll tell,’ Gladys said. ‘She might’ve changed her mind by Christmas.’
V
1956
Twenty-Eight
July 1956
Rachel walked along Harborne Park Road with Sandra asleep for once, in the pram. At the baby’s feet, tucked into the pram, were Rachel’s bits of shopping: a loaf, potatoes, bacon and salad.
She pushed the pram along slowly, gripping the handle hard to still the tremor in her hands.
I can’t go home, she thought. Not yet.
Usually she still felt a tingle of excitement each time she went back to their new home in Harborne. The novelty of it all – seeing that miraculous ‘For Rent’ sign, Danny giving in at last, the move across town – would take a long time to wear off. At last she had got what she wanted! It all took getting used to. She felt on her best behaviour in Harborne. But still – it was a new start and she was excited by all of it, the extra space, the television in the front room, the kitchen with taps and a bathroom with a lavatory indoors!
But today was different.
She steered the
pram into the park on Grove Lane, found a place away from anyone else and sank on to the grass, trying to still her breathing. Her heart was banging like mad, an ache spreading across her chest. She stared, unseeing, across the green swathe in front of her.
For the first time – amazing that it was the first time now that she thought about it – since they had moved to Harborne, she had just seen Michael Livingstone. She came out of the bakery and there he was, across the street. He did not see her, she was certain. The reason he did not notice her was because he was not alone: he was walking arm in arm with a woman. The sight sent a jolt through her: the woman was dark-haired, pretty. Rachel had turned away immediately and hurried in the other direction.
Each school day now, either she or Danny pushed Tommy along the road in his wheelchair. The taxis were no longer needed. Rachel was not working at the school for the moment because of just having had Sandra. She missed it and now she was stuck in the house all the more. They took the same route to Carlson House each day, straight down to Victoria Road. She knew that other than that first time she met Michael, when he had taken a detour for a change, he had no reason to walk down there.
From the day she left his house, she had never seen Michael again. She had known she must cut off from him completely, otherwise she would go back and back, drawn in by his need and her own, and by the excitement of knowing that someone wanted her so badly.
For a time afterwards she grieved, feeling as if she had a heavy stone in her chest. Many times she thought of running back there to him, into his arms, his life, even though she knew that Danny was really her man and always would be. Lovely, gentle Michael had given her something warm and new and satisfying. During the rare times she could be alone, she would sit and weep and dream of him. But then she and Danny made it up and he put away the idea of taking off to Australia. And everything seemed to go back to normal again.
She put Michael and what had happened behind her, especially once Sandra was born last October – a good birth, a quick one and another girl at last! – and she was again overwhelmed with a new baby. Any thought of him receded. By the spring, all those familiar queasy feelings were back – she was expecting again. She even wondered if something guilty in her body was still making it up to Danny for her thinking about another man. Silly as it seemed, she wondered if that was why she had fallen pregnant again so quickly after Sandra.
Gazing across the park, she watched a blue-black crow stalk its way across the green. The grass was short and she caught the fruity smell of half-decayed grass cuttings. When she realized, just a few weeks ago, that she was carrying yet another child she had felt as if it was some kind of punishment.
Lowering her head she allowed the pain to seep through her. It was a pain of longing, loss, jealousy. Michael had longed for her. Now, presumably, he longed for someone else. She had no right to him, to feel any of these things. But feel them she did. She ached with unreasonable jealousy, with the loss of that specialness that she had felt with him.
She took a few deep breaths and raised her head. Thank God I saw him, she thought, calming gradually. Now, if it happened again, she would be prepared. She could say hello and move on. She got to her feet. In the distance she heard the excited shrieks of children. The end of school. A feeling of great weariness came over her. Summer holidays. Kids at home, all the time. She had to try and pull herself together.
‘Go up and get her for me, Melly, will you? She’s awake again.’
It was the first thing Mom said as Melly came in through the door.
Melly went upstairs, dragging her feet. ‘What did your last slave die of?’ she muttered to herself. She went into the front bedroom where Mom and Dad slept, where her new sister, Sandra, now ten months old, was lying in a cot next to their bed. A cot – that was a new thing – none of the rest of them had slept in a cot!
Sandra’s face was screwed up ready to let out another yell, but at the sight of a face above her, she stopped, looking mildly surprised. Standing over her baby sister, who everyone said looked very much as she had done at that age, Melly let out a sharp sigh.
‘All right, all right – don’t start that.’ She picked up the little bundle, warm, moist and wide-eyed from sleep. Sandra let out a squeak. ‘You’re a noisy so-and-so, you are. Why can’t you stay asleep a bit longer? You’ve put Mom in a right bad mood again.’
Melly was not in the best of moods herself. They had moved to Harborne in February when she only had a few more months left at school. She had travelled across to Aston each day, having to get up early and catch two buses, and half felt as if she had not really left. She popped in most days to see Gladys. Gladys had dug her heels in and refused to move.
‘They can carry me out of here in my box,’ she said. ‘I’m not being pushed out of my home.’
Sometimes she went to see Lil and Stanley. They were also hanging on in the old yard.
‘Where else’ve we got to go?’ Lil would say. ‘It’d be out of the frying pan into the fire.’
Mrs Davies was still shrieking. The Morrisons’ house was occupied by two bony-cheeked women who looked like sisters but Lil told her were a mother and daughter, and there was a young boy with them. Lil, trying to look on the bright side, said they were nice enough, but Melly could see she was missing the old familiar faces. She seemed really glad to see Melly when she came in now. And Melly liked to see them. Harborne was very different: quieter, greener, more genteel. But it was nice to go back and visit Auntie and the familiar old end. She was drawn back to Aston in the same way Mo kept going back to drink in the Salutation where he knew everyone.
But today the term had ended – her last ever day at school! She knew she would miss some of her friends from that side of town, but leaving school with her references for a job had been exciting. She was fifteen – a grown-up ready to go out in the world.
When she got home, released with all the other schoolchildren, she walked into the house almost expecting a fanfare. Melly’s left school!
Fat chance. She wished she’d gone to see Auntie today instead. At least she would have remembered.
No one was taking any notice of her at home because Tommy was away in hospital having further attention to his leg and Mom was about to set off and visit him. As usual, Tommy was all she could think about. Kev and Ricky, who had moved to a local school, were out, most likely tearing about in the park with a bunch of other lads. When Melly walked in, Mom didn’t even look up.
‘Hurry up,’ Melly heard her mother call after her as she dragged her way upstairs. ‘I can’t stand that blarting.’
‘All you ever do, eat and cry,’ Melly said to Sandra.
She loved her little sister really, but Mom was expecting yet again now and Sandra didn’t sleep well. They all heard her yowling in the night. Mom was forever tired and bad-tempered and she, Melly, bore the brunt not just of that, but of a lot of the work.
If they don’t want more babies, she thought crossly, why keep having them? Her knowledge of these matters had increased since Cissy married Teddy Meeks in May. In the way of a queen dispensing favours to her commoners, Cissy informed Melly of the intimate facts of life, sometimes in rather more detail than Melly really required. But Cissy had no intention of having babies yet.
‘I want to have some fun before I get into all that,’ Cissy declared. ‘I don’t want to spoil myself. I’m not like Rachel.’
Despite everyone’s misgivings, Cissy had kept on and on until Peggy and Fred relented and let her marry Teddy. Despite the difference in their ages, they both seemed like a pair of children together. And Teddy was treating her like a queen. Cissy didn’t even have to go out to work!
Carrying Sandra downstairs, Melly handed her to Mom who held out her arms absent-mindedly, saying, ‘I’ll go straight over to the hospital after this.’ She latched Sandra on for a feed, her cardigan draped carelessly over her for modesty’s sake.
‘Oh,’ Melly said. So she’d be cooking tea and looking after the others then.
‘Good.’
‘What’s up with you?’ Mom asked, sounding irritated.
‘Nothing.’
She stomped to the back of the house, into the little rectangle of garden, and stood against the back wall, tilting her chin to catch the sun on her face.
‘What would you care anyway?’ she whispered.
Staring morosely up at the cloud-dotted sky, Melly thought, all Mom ever does is have babies and clean the house and cook. Every time she thought about her own future and what it might hold, she was filled with dread. Was that all there was? Leave school, have babies, stink of bleach all your life, then get old?
Cissy had the right idea, even though she didn’t see a lot of point in Cissy’s life either. All she seemed to do was prettify the enormous house Teddy’s father had bought for them. She had met a couple of other young wives – older than her, but all looking for company – and they went out to milk bars together in Coventry. On Saturdays they went to the golf club where Teddy played. Cissy claimed that it was all marvellous.
Staring across at the backs of the houses in the next street, Melly muttered, ‘When I’m older, I’m never going to be like any of you. I want some life, not just babies.’ A sense of mission filled her. ‘I want to do something.’
Twenty-Nine
They’d already had words about what exactly she was going to do when she left school; one wintry evening, soon after they moved across town. They were all sitting round the tea table. The fire was lit in the back room and it felt very cosy as they had their tea, but it didn’t stop Melly leaving the table ready to explode with anger and frustration.
‘You’ll come on the market,’ Dad had said. ‘You’re a market trader through and through. If you start off with me, we could put you on a list for your own stall. P’r’aps we’ll move into a shop.’ He was forever on the lookout for something else, for expansion, branching out. ‘You could take over Auntie’s pitch.’