Orphans of War

‘Arthur’s street urchin, more like. Brought up in a pub, I ask you, while they cavort themselves on a public stage. I am sick of this dratted war upsetting everything. Where’s it all going to end?’

‘As far as I can see the world has ended for Madeleine; bombed out, her granny dead and parents stuck halfway across the world. Just think of someone else, for a change…or would you prefer life under Herr Hitler?’

‘Don’t be facetious, Prunella. You forget yourself. This hostel thing has gone to your head and coarsened you. I’m too old to look after children.’ Mother looked up, her mouth pursed into a mean straight line. She was being unreasonable as usual. Time to butter her up with compliments. It always worked.

‘Rubbish! You’ll rise to the challenge, you always do. Look how you’ve provided a house for children already, made a home for Great-uncle Algie and Great-aunt Julia and her companion, and employed refugees. You try to set an example in the community. “By your fruits are ye known”–you keep quoting at me. We’ll manage, and I can see to Madeleine.’

‘But I said I’d never speak to him again.’

‘She’s Arthur’s child. She’s no quarrel with you. The girl never asked to be born or be part of this estrangement. Where’s your heart? Do we take in strangers but not our own just because of a silly quarrel?’ Plum lit a cigarette from her silver case, drew a deep breath as if it were an oxygen mask. Suddenly she felt so weary.

Pleasance Belfield was the daughter of a cotton magnate who had married into another successful business family. How quickly she’d forgotten her own roots. The Belfields weren’t old money but new money made in the cotton trade in Lancashire in the last century. They only bought the manor house when the ancient Coldicote family died out. Why did Mother have to behave as if she was queen of all she surveyed?

This poor mite might be the only grandchild she would ever have. How could she dismiss her so lightly?

‘Your grandchild needs a home, Mother. Think about it, at least,’ Plum pleaded.

‘I don’t know what’s got into you, young lady. You used to be so compliant and now you’re smoking like a chimney,’ Pleasance replied, ignoring her request, ready to criticise as usual.

‘I’m nearly forty years old. I’ll smoke if I like, but for your enlightenment, here are just a few reasons why I do. I wasn’t trained for anything but marriage and I have a husband who doesn’t love me. I have no children of my own to cherish. I have a brother risking his neck in the skies halfway across the world to keep us safe, so don’t call me “young lady”. I feel as old as the hills but I would never turn a child of this family from the door, so if you don’t like any of this then I’ll pack my bags and stay down in the Vic and take Madeleine with me.’

Plum stood up to beat a retreat to her room. It was the only place in the house where she could think her own thoughts. She was in no mood for any more arguments. This rebellion had been coming for months. She was sick of pandering to Pleasance’s whims and fancies. She could go to hell!

‘Prunella! I suppose you’d better send a telegram at once and meet her in Leeds with the others–but I don’t like it one bit,’ Pleasance sighed with a look of martyrdom on her face.

‘I’m sure you don’t, but you were never one to shirk your duty. Sowerthwaite expects you to lead by example, and what better than to take in a victim of the blitz? I shall need the car to collect them all from the station.’

Plum smiled to herself with relief. Round one to Arthur and his girl. Round one to her, for once.

3 (#ulink_7469db32-495c-5dd5-a49f-ceff397f4058)

Victoria Station, Manchester, September 1940

Gloria Conley tugged her little brother along the platform, trying to keep up with her mother, who was rushing through the crowds on Victoria Station, dodging kitbags slung over shoulders. Sid kept tripping over men sitting on the platform. The place smelled of steam and smoke and smelly armpits, but it was so exciting to be up close to those big iron monsters. There’d been so much to see since they got off the Kearsley bus into town. It was the longest journey she’d ever had, but Sid was whining about his ear hurting. Where were they going? Gloria hoped it was a trip to the seaside.

‘Now you stay put, while I get you some sweeties,’ smiled Mam, who was all dolled up in a short jacket and summer frock with a silly little beret with a feather stuck on the side. The soldiers wolf-whistled when she passed and shouted, ‘Give us a kiss, Rita Hayworth!’ Mam wiggled her bum, enjoying every minute of the attention, for she looked so pretty with her shoulder-length red hair and kiss curls.

Gloria was gripping Sid’s wrist for dear life in case they got swept away in the rush. As the carriage doors opened, bodies poured out with suitcases and parcels, and porters rushed around with trolleys. Gloria could hear whistles blowing and the smell of soot went up her nose.

Mam soon came back with Fry’s chocolate bars and fizzy pop in a bottle. They were going on a journey, that’s all Gloria had been told, and they had to be good.

Since the telegram came last week, Mam had been acting funny There’d been tears, and the usual aunties sitting round smoking and drinking stout. Something bad had happened: not the coppers banging on the door of their two up and two down in Elijah Street, looking for Uncle Sam, who had run away from the war: not the welfare man coming to see why she’d missed school again: not that nosy parker from two doors down who didn’t like the gentlemen callers banging the door at all hours. It was all to do with the ‘war on’.

‘His dad’s copped it good and proper this time and won’t be coming back. What’m I going to do with you two now?’ Mam sighed with a funny look in her eye while they were on the platform. ‘You’ll have to be a big girl and take charge of Sidney. I want more for you than I’ve got here, do you hear? This is no life for kiddies.’ Mam was snivelling and rabbiting on, shoving a letter in her pocket, a letter Gloria couldn’t read because she was still stuck with baby reading and had missed a lot of schooling looking after Sid while Mam slept in.

‘Give this to the policeman on the train, or one of them teachers down there, look…with the children. It’ll explain, but no telling fibs, Gloria. Be a good girl. Don’t lose yer gas masks. You’ll be the better without me, love. I’m doing this for your own good.’

Mam was crying and Gloria just wanted to cling on tight to her cotton frock, suddenly afraid. Something terrible was about to happen at this station. ‘Where’re we going?’ she sobbed. For a girl of well over ten she was the size of a nine-year-old, her face framed in her pixie hood.

‘Now, none of that! It’s for the best. I’ve got to do right by you…I’m going to join up and do my bit.’ Mam shoved a clean hanky in her face. ‘Blow!’

Gloria didn’t understand what she was getting at but Sid was crying and holding his ear. He always had sore ears. He was her half-brother. Not that she knew who her own dad was. His name was never mentioned. The one that got killed was Uncle Jim, Sid’s dad, but he was too young to understand. He could be a right mardy baby when he got one of his earaches.

Mam shoved them down the platform following the party of school children with little cases and gas masks, but they went into a full carriage. The train was packed, so she hung back suddenly. ‘Damn! We’ll happen wait for the next one coming,’ she said. ‘You’d better go to the lav, Glory. No one wants a kiddie with wet knickers.’

What was going on? Her life was full of mysteries, Gloria thought, sitting on the big wooden toilet seat in the ladies. There was the mystery of the customers who came to Elijah Street, the aunties who were always popping in, the men who went upstairs day and night to buy.

What Mam sold was another mystery, but it meant lots of jumping up and down on the bed and sometimes the plaster came down from the living-room ceiling where Gloria had to keep Sid amused.

She knew Mr Cummings, who came regular as clockwork on Sunday afternoons. When they set off for Clarendon Street Sunday school, he gave them cough drops out of his pocket with fluff on them and told them to hop it. There were others she didn’t like who came for a ‘seeing to’.

Lily Davidson’s mum was a hairdresser and saw her customers at the kitchen sink. Freda Pointer across the road went with her mam round the doors selling magazines. They were religious.

Sometimes when Gloria went upstairs, Mam’s bed was all rumpled and messy and smelled of perfume and sweat. ‘What do you do up there?’ she once asked.

‘Nothing you would understand, love. I make them better,’ she explained with a smile.

‘Like Dr Phipps?’ she asked.

‘Sort of. I give them treatments to help their sore backs and aches and pains,’ Mam said, and Gloria felt better after that.

In the playground of Clarendon Street Juniors she told Freda Pointer that her mother was a doctor and everyone started to laugh.

‘My mam says your mam’s a tuppenny tart, a lady of the night and she’ll go to Hell!’

‘No, she’s not! She never goes out at night,’ Gloria shouted, knowing it wasn’t exactly true as sometimes she woke up and found the door unlocked and no one in the house but her and Sid. If there was a raid she had to drag him out of bed and under the stairs to the cubbyhole and wait for the all clear. Sometimes she took him to Auntie Elsie’s shelter down the road.

‘Hark at ’er, ginger nut. You’re so stupid, anyone can see she’s a tart!’ Freda made everyone laugh and this made Gloria angry. With all that mass of copper curls, just like her mam, she did have a temper on her. She yanked at Freda’s plaits until she screamed blue murder and they punched each other and kicked shins until they both got the cane for fighting in the yard.

That was when she bunked off school again and went round the shops until it was home time. The welfare man called round and she got a clout from Mam for bringing trouble to the door.

‘We’re as good as any up this street and don’t you forget it. I give a service like anyone else. I’m doing war work, in my own way. Them across the road don’t even hold with fighting. You’ve only got one life, Glory. Make the most of it–grab it while you can before you end up like poor Jim, fifty fathoms deep among the fishes, God rest his soul.’

When Gloria got back on the platform Mam was begging cigs off a soldier.

‘That took a long time,’ she laughed. ‘Your skirt’s still tucked in yer knicks! Aren’t you a sight…Now you look after Sid while I just take a stroll with this nice man.’ She winked. ‘I’ll not be long’.

‘Mam!’ Gloria called, suddenly afraid as the feathers on the beret disappeared into the crowd. Would Mam come back to them? Gloria felt sick and clung on to her brother.

Was she nearly there, thought Maddy for the umpteenth time. It was hard to see just where they were on that long grimy train heading east, with its damp sooty carriages and brown sauce upholstery. It had taken hours and hours, and the train kept stopping in the middle of nowhere. She peered through the oval hole in the centre of the window, the bit that wasn’t plastered up in case there was a blast. All she could see were embankments black with burned undergrowth.

She’d eaten her sandwiches up ages ago and now she was down to the last dregs of the medicine bottle of milk, but there was one bit of chocolate stuck to the pocket lining of her gaberdine school mac. Ivy had shoved the bar in her hand when she saw her off at the station and made sure the guard knew she must be put off at Leeds.

She felt stupid with a label tied round her button and pulled it off, not wanting to be a parcel to be delivered to Brooklyn Hall, Sowerthwaite. What sort of village hall was that: a tin shack with corrugated roof?

The carriages were packed with troops straight off the docks, who slept in the corridors and played cards, the blue cigarette smoke in the carriage like thick fog.

In her pocket was a telegram from Mummy promising they’d get back as soon as they could and asking her to be polite to Grandma Belfield and Aunt Prunella until they came to collect her. She had slept with that letter under her pillow. She could smell Mummy’s perfume on the paper and it gave her such comfort.