A Wartime Secret

by Annie Murray

  It was no use crying because no comfort would be offered. She rubbed her smarting hands which were coated with dirt from the door, before tugging at the hem of her grubby frock. The skirt was too short to cover her plump knees. In a month she would be turning ten years old and she had grown fast this summer, her clothes not keeping up. The bodice was skintight, pressing in on her when she breathed, hurting the sore bruises on her chest. She hadn’t managed to move quick enough yesterday when Mom was in a temper.

  Fearfully she glanced along the street. Mom would be coming back soon. But for now, all was quiet.

  Vaguely, she wiped her hands down her frock, then inserted the first two fingers of her right hand into her mouth and drifted into one of her dreamy states, shutting off her mind from Rita and Shirley’s taunting voices. She sank into the moment she was living now, not thinking of anything else.

  Her gaze met the mucky blue-brick pavements, smoke-blackened terraces and factories of Inkerman Street, in this neighbourhood of Ladywood, Birmingham, where they had only been living for a couple of weeks. In many ways it was no different from where they had lived before in Aston. There were the same soot-encrusted terraces and back-to-back houses; the same smoking chimneys and bomb pecks littered with weeds and rubble; the same filthy puddles, dried to mud now in the warmth; the same sort of cobbled streets, dozens of kids playing on them and the houses along them teeming with occupants.

  But still, everything felt strange. They were living in a front house, opening onto the street, instead of onto a yard, the way they had been before. Every morning now, she had to stagger all the way round and down the entry, the family’s morning wee bucket yanking on her arm, to the yard lavs to slop out. It was always her job. But here she did not see any of the familiar faces she had known all her life.

  The night they left their back house and yard, they never went to bed. Their father, Ray Sutton, sober for once, cuffed at them, cursing any sound they made – ‘Don’t wake them cowing nosey parkers.’ They loaded their few sticks into a van and fled both the yard and the rent man, to this crumbling house at the corner of a yard entry where another house met it back-to-back. It was in worse repair than the one they’d left, on the yard off Alma Street, Aston.

  When she let herself think of it, Evie ached with missing the neighbours who had been kind to her. Mrs Booker – Rachel to her friends – and her daughter Melly, who was a couple of years older than Evie. There was old Mrs Poulter, who wore black and had blue eyes that seemed to look deep into you, and Mo and his pretty wife Dolly – Mr and Mrs Morrison. They had given her what her family almost never did – kindness and comfort. And now there was no one. Or so she thought.

  ‘Won’t they let you in, bab?’

  She hadn’t seen them coming. For a second the kindly voice seemed to come from a golden-haired, smiling face which had drawn level with her, mouth open, a pink tongue lolling in the muggy warmth. The face of a big, hairy dog. Evie’s heart fluttered at the sight. It was so friendly, so furry and soft!

  Evie pulled her fingers out of her mouth and looked at the dog’s owner – a middle-aged lady in a print frock and flat brown shoes, her frizzy grey-brown hair clipped back on one side with a kirby grip. She was scraggily thin, with a wart on the left side of her nose and a lop-sided smile. And she looked homely and kind.

  ‘That’s not very nice, is it?’ she added. ‘Leaving you out on the step?’

  Evie did recognize the lady. She lived in the house on the other side of the entry. She and her husband, called Mr and Mrs Waring, had knocked on the door the day after they moved in to introduce themselves. But Evie had seen Mrs Waring’s expression after the ‘welcome’ she got from Mom – arms clenched aggressively across her chest, ‘What d’yow want then?’ – and didn’t think she’d be seeing her again. Since then she had only caught sight of her and the dog in the distance.

  ‘Can I stroke ’im?’ Evie said longingly.

  ‘Course you can, bab.’ The lady smiled at her, revealing gaps in her teeth. People did smile at her, and often told her she was pretty, with her sweet waves of blonde hair and plump cheeks. ‘Our Whisky likes a bit of attention. ’Er’s a good old girl – a lady dog, bab, not a boy. There you go, Whisky, say hello to the little girl.’

  Evie plunged her hand into the dog’s warm fur. It felt so silky and lovely. Whisky turned her head and panted amiably at her and Evie fell to her knees and threw her arms round the dog, pushing her face into her comforting coat.

  ‘Eh, go easy. You don’t want her to snap,’ Mrs Waring said.

  The dog didn’t seem to mind. She was a soft old thing. Despite Evie’s enthusiastic affection she just shifted on her feet a bit and carried on panting.

  ‘Tell you what, bab,’ Mrs Waring said. ‘D’you want to come in and see our birds?’

  Evie nodded and got to her feet. They walked the short distance past the entry to Mrs Waring’s house and all the time Evie kept her hand on the dog’s back. Oh, if she could only have a dog like Whisky, a true friend, there all the time.

  Soon she was inside a neat downstairs room. Despite the rotten state of all the houses, it was simply furnished and reassuring; the range was polished, there was an embroidered cloth on the table and everything was in its place. On the sideboard to the left was a cage with two budgies perched inside. One was green, one blue.

  ‘That’s Billy and Bobby,’ Mrs Waring told her as Evie pushed her nose right up against the thin bars of the cage. There was a sour smell and she felt the air move against her face as they fluttered their wings in panic at her sudden appearance.

  ‘We’ve got a cat called Charlie somewhere,’ Mrs Waring said with a chuckle. ‘They don’t like Charlie.’

  Evie stared, mesmerized, into the cage. This house felt blissful. She wanted to stay forever.

  As she was looking, a voice sounded at the door. ‘Cooee! Mavis?’

  ‘That you, Con?’ Mrs Waring called.

  ‘Just thought I’d pop in,’ the voice continued. ‘I’m on my way back from getting Bill’s bit of liver . . . Oh, who’s that?’

  ‘It’s one of the new ones at number twenty-nine,’ Mrs Waring said. She lowered her voice to say something Evie couldn’t hear. But at the end she heard her say, ‘. . . poor little mite. Such a pretty little thing. I can’t understand it . . . But seeing that mother of hers, she’s . . .’ Her voice sank again and Evie only caught snatches. ‘. . . so quarrelsome . . . Mrs Charles, of course . . . coloureds . . . seems decent enough . . . no call for it . . .’

  When she turned round, Mrs Waring and the other lady, who was short and plump, were both looking at her.

  ‘Can I stroke the dog again?’ she asked in a whisper.

  ‘Course you can, bab,’ Mrs Waring said.

  She saw the ladies look at each other but she took no notice, cuddled up against Whisky’s hot coat and rhythmic breathing, a loving haven away from everything.

  ‘Where’ve you been, pig face?’

  As soon as Evie stepped back in the house, Shirley jumped on her, forcing her against the wall, an arm each side of her. Shirley, the younger of Evie’s two sisters, was nearly twelve. Rita was getting on for fourteen. Both younger sisters lived in fear and dread of Rita. Sometimes, when Rita was not around and Shirley was bored, she was nice to Evie. Mostly, though, she tried to keep on the right side of Rita.

  ‘Come on, out with it.’ She moved her face threateningly close to Evie’s. Her breath smelt of bad teeth.

  ‘Nowhere.’ Evie wriggled and ducked, trying to get out of Shirley’s grasp. There was no one else in this, the only downstairs room. Mom must still be out. Feet came thumping down the stairs accompanied by Rita’s voice:

  ‘Is that ’er back?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Shirley said, with triumph. ‘I got ’er.’

  Shirley had a bit more flesh on her than Rita, who was scrawny as a plucked fowl. Shirley favoured their father with his handsome looks. As she had grown, her hair had gone darker. Like him, she was brown-eyed, b
ig boned and sultry looking. She was wearing a coffee-coloured frock down to her knees and scuffed black lace-up shoes, the soles shored up with cardboard inside.

  Evie stood very still, her heart pounding. Her sisters were never nice to her but it wasn’t often she got trapped with them like this. They were stuck for something to do. The long, empty school holidays left hours free for bullying. Especially now, because they didn’t know anyone else in this new neighbourhood.

  In seconds, Evie’s animal senses took over. Jolted out of her dreamlike refuge, she was fully alert. Hopeless as it seemed, she tried the only trick she could think of. It might work with Shirley, who was slow-witted like Mom.

  She gave a sharp look over Shirley’s shoulder as if she had seen something and bawled with urgent force, ‘Shirl, quick! Watch it!’

  Shirley’s head whipped round. As Rita reached the bottom step, Evie ducked under Shirley’s arm and was out of the door again, tearing along the street. She ducked into an entry, waiting for the drumming footsteps to follow her. But there was nothing. Her sisters were too idle to run. No Rita with her scheming face; no Shirley with her sharp, scratching nails. It had worked. For now.

  Her frock was so tight it made panting an effort. Standing in the entry’s dank shade, her blood was beginning to steady until she realized, with a shock that made her heart bang hard again, that she was not alone. There was someone further along in the gloom, crouched in a cringing posture against the wall, arms wrapped round bony knees and peering up at her as if expecting the worst.

  Two

  For a moment they stared at each other. Whoever it was squatting down there, hugging those skinny legs, seemed poised on a knife-edge, ready to leap up and run for it.

  In the gloom she made out eyes, wary as an animal’s, watching her from behind a pair of wonky wire spectacles with thick lenses. White shinbones ended in enormous boots which made the legs look even thinner. Evie wasn’t sure at first whether the child – who she guessed to be a bit younger than herself – was a boy or a girl. Round the pinched face hung a matt of chaotic, mucky brown hair.

  At last, with an air of getting it over with, the gawky creature looked up at her and said, ‘I s’pose you’re gunna lamp me an’ all?’

  Evie began to relax. There seemed no need to be frightened. This person did not appear to be out to get her. But she folded her arms across her, just in case.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Why d’yer think I am? Why’re you sat down there?’

  He – she could hear from his gruffness that he was a boy – got slowly to his feet, wiping his forearm across his nose with a squelchy sniff. Evie thought he looked as if he had been crying, which surprised her. She never bothered with crying anymore. It never got you anywhere. He was wearing shorts so scant that they showed off a daft amount of his grubby legs. At the top was a baggy shirt, filthy and held together at the front by one remaining button.

  ‘This ’un’s a double knack,’ he said, jerking his head at the yard behind him. ‘If they come down ’ere, I can gerraway.’ The yard, unlike most, had two entrances, one to get in by and one to escape through – a double knack.

  ‘Who’s chasing yer?’ she asked, intrigued to find someone else running away.

  The boy shrugged and looked down, seeming ashamed. ‘Them. Out there.’

  She wasn’t sure who he meant. There were crowds of children who played out in the street. So far she didn’t know any of them and she didn’t remember seeing the boy before. There was a silence, before he looked up at her.

  ‘Who’re you running away from then?’

  ‘My sisters.’

  ‘Lamp yer, do they?’ he said with a sense of gloomy inevitability.

  She nodded. Yes, they hit her. Scratched, poked, did Chinese burns, tricked, ganged up on her . . . And Mom and Dad lashed out – especially when the drink was in, which was often. She shrugged.

  ‘I ain’t seen you before,’ he observed. ‘Which one’s your ’ouse? In the yard?’

  ‘Number twenty-nine, Inkerman Street,’ she repeated mechanically.

  Voices began at the end of the entry, lads shouting. The boy let out a whimper and stiffened like a cat that’s seen a fierce dog. He squinted along the entry towards the road and without another word, spun round and tore off towards the yard behind. She heard the clump of his Mail boots as he dashed away.

  ‘Evie ran off,’ Rita shouted later, in the direction of their mother who was by the gas stove in the scullery. Mom had managed to get back into the house without falling out with anyone, it seemed, which was a miracle in itself.

  Smugly, Rita added, ‘She defied me. I told her to stop ’ere.’

  Rita was supposed to be in charge when Mom was out and she queened it over them. The only skinny one of the females in the family, she had a white, mean face with narrow eyes, a sharp nose and lank brown hair. She spent a lot of time looking in the cracked glass over the scullery sink. If there was one thing that drove her to a distraction of jealousy, it was anyone saying how pretty Evie was – which she was, with her rounded, peachy looks and Cupid’s bow lips. She had all the best of their mother, who had once been naturally blonde and curvaceous but who was now thickened and achieved blondeness out of a bottle.

  Their mom, Irene Sutton, was stirring a stew. When she bothered to cook at all, stew was the only thing she knew except eggs. She would keep a pot on the stove, throwing things into it day after day until whatever scraps of bony meat had started it off were long gone and it turned to a mush of carrot and turnip in a distant memory of gravy. But now a real, brown stew smell filled the room, hinting at the actual presence of beef. It was Friday night: meat bought on the strap, on the promise of today’s pay packet.

  The pay packet she was waiting for this very moment.

  The Sutton family were making a new start. The house, like all the other jerry-built, bomb-damaged, infested buildings in the area, was fated for eventual demolition. It was a rotting wreck – ceilings sagging, the rooms damp, mildewed and alive with silverfish and roaches, the remaining stair treads perilous. But one piece of luck was that the previous occupant, an elderly widow called Mrs Garnet, had died. Her son had found very little in the house that he wanted and most of her chattels remained, providing the Suttons with more furniture than they had possessed in a long time. In Aston, the few chairs they owned had been so worm-ridden that Ray, their father, had gradually fed them into the fire and they ended up sitting on a stool and orange boxes.

  There had not been much upstairs when they arrived in the new house: a couple of bedsteads, one with the mattress in a most unspeakable state. They had to take it out, burn it on one of the bomb pecks and get another. But the other, which Rita and Shirley slept on, was all right and the downstairs living room seemed positively crowded to Evie. Inside the front door was a sideboard, the wood sticky with soot and grease, but also containing some crocks yellowed with age and a sheaf of old Mrs Garnet’s papers which were even more so. The table – a surprisingly new utility thing – occupied half the room, near the range. Along the front wall, at right angles to the range, was a wooden settle. Its leather upholstery might once have been red and the leather was so old that it had melted into the wood frame. There were also three wooden chairs round the table – an unheard of number of places to sit down! Not that Evie ever expected to sit on one if anyone else was about. She had never in her life slept in a bed that was not a makeshift thing on the floor, or sat on a chair for long without being turfed off it.

  Three weeks ago Ray had been sacked from the Kynoch Works in Witton, after his weekend drinking bouts had spread into the week. He had not been in the forces during the war, but on munitions at Kynoch’s. There had been plenty of work for him to earn the means to pour as much down his throat as he wanted and still just make the rent. And he had been younger then, before – as he saw it – life and the womenfolk had taken their toll.

  Until Kynoch’s kicked him out, Ray had never been handed his cards in his life before. It was a
shock. For now, he was trying to pull himself together. Ray, just turned forty years old, had been a man of gleamingly handsome looks, now largely scuppered by drink. His coal-black hair was thinner, his cheeks, dark with thrusting stubble, were now flaccid, the chin less well defined, his belly like an overhanging cliff. But he could still scrub up when vanity or lusts of the flesh required it, slick his hair back, brush down his one decent jacket and flash his money around as if it was in bottomless supply.

  Unemployment meant the rent man knocking and no money for the boozer. After their moonlight flit he had got himself taken on for a heavy job at Docker’s, the paint factory, hauling sacks of fossil gum from trucks and hefting them over the side of the steaming vats, emptying in the contents for melting into varnish. He came home worn out and oil-smeared and coughing – but with a wage packet. This, bar the rent, he felt entitled to spend entirely on himself. Their mother had to wrestle money for food out of him.

  ‘I dunno why they had to go and change everything,’ Irene moaned to Rita from time to time. Rita was about to turn fourteen, but the school leaving age had been raised to fifteen. ‘Wasting yower time in that cowing place when you could be earning yower keep.’

  ‘Why don’t you go out to work, Mom?’ Shirley once asked.

  Irene rounded on her, furious. ‘I ain’t going out to be a dray-horse – that’s yer father’s job.’

  Asking Mom questions was always risky. Her childhood in Netherton, in the Black Country, was a blank mystery to them. But an innocent query like, ‘Why ain’t we got a Nanna and a Granddad?’ would be met with a crash of Mom’s fleshy hand round the head and, ‘Shut yer cake’ole and stop mithering me!’ She specialized in getting you in the ear and leaving your head ringing.

  Now, in the steam-filled room, the walls running with damp, Rita waited for her mother to take her side over her dig at Evie, but she didn’t even turn round. ‘Shurrit, Reet,’ was all she said, moodily. ‘Get these spuds done.’