Now the War Is Over (15 page)

Peggy rolled her eyes again and changed the subject.

‘Come on,’ Cissy whispered, beckoning to Melly.

The girls went into the bedroom and Cissy twirled round in front of her in the green dress.

‘Mom made it for me for Christmas. D’you think Freddie’d like me in it?’

Oh, Melly thought. Here we go.

It took two buses to get home. By the time they got back it was dark and foggy and everyone was frozen and all in favour of buying a car. They were also at screaming pitch
after a few hours with Peggy.

‘I don’t know why I bother,’ Rachel ranted as they waited for the bus in town. ‘She’s so wrapped up in herself. She can never see what anyone else might have going
on, or—’

‘She’s not gonna change, Rach,’ Danny said, putting his arm round her shoulders. Melly was warmed by the sight. How must it feel to have a man love you? she wondered, with
dread and excitement bubbling in her again now they were on the way home. Suppose when she got there, there was a note waiting for her – from him? Maybe Reggie would be too shy to come
himself?

‘It’s all right for you,’ Rachel was saying. ‘You just let it all wash over you.’

‘She’s still your mother,’ Danny said. His own mother had died when he was nine.

‘Huh,’ Rachel said. She looked cold and deflated. ‘I’m not doing this next year. She can bloody well come and see us.’

There was no note waiting at the house. Nothing. Melly looked to see if Gladys had anything to tell her – had Reggie been round while they were out? But no. They were all
tired out after the day of high emotions and more indulgent eating than usual. Melly went up to bed soon after her brothers, shivering in the freezing room. Ricky was grizzly but Kevin went out
like a light, his wiry body tucked in beside Tommy.

‘Night, Tommy,’ Melly whispered and heard him mutter a reply in the darkness.

She lay there, her feet icy, allowing herself to feel miserable and hurt. But she told herself that Reggie might not have wanted to come round with everyone there. Maybe he would speak to her
himself, when they were on their own . . . And very soon she was asleep too.

The next thing she heard was screaming and she leapt up in bed, thinking it was one of the boys having a nightmare. The noise was so loud she had thought it was in the room.
Then she realized it was coming from outside the window.

‘Oh, my God!’ It was a woman, hysterical, beside herself. ‘What’re we gonna do? How can we get there?’

Other voices joined in.

‘Melly?’ She heard Tommy in the dark. ‘What’s that?’ Kevin and Ricky still seemed to be asleep.

‘I don’t know.’ She got out of bed and sat on the boys’ bed. There were more noises – Gladys’s door opening; hurried footsteps on the attic stairs. There was
a further mix of voices outside, male and female, more hysterical shouting, more crying. Melly went to the window. In the lamplight she could see a knot of people.

‘It’s Dolly,’ Melly said, horrified. Happy, kindly Dolly Morrison, sounding utterly distraught.

At last the noises died away. She heard the grown-ups come back into the house and shut the door but they didn’t come upstairs.

‘I’m going to see,’ she told Tommy. ‘I’ll be back in a tick.’ She had a terrible thought growing in her. If it was Dolly, did that mean something had happened
. . . ? Could something have happened to Reggie?

She found Mom and Dad and Gladys all standing downstairs. To her surprise, the clock on the mantelpiece said that it was only half past eleven. She felt as if she had been asleep for hours on
end. All of them turned to look at her.

‘I heard everyone shouting,’ she said. ‘What’s going on?’

Gladys sank into a chair. She was shaking and seemed unable to speak.

‘Oh, Melly –’ Mom came over to her. ‘Poor, poor Dolly and Mo. There’s been an accident. The two of them were coming home on the bike – Wally and
Reggie.’ Mom knelt down, putting her hands on Melly’s shoulders. ‘They hit a lorry. We don’t know anything much yet – they’ve gone to the hospital – but .
. .’ She shook her head and looked down for a second. ‘It’s bad by the sound of things. We don’t know if either of them are alive.’

‘My boy! Oh, my lovely boy – he was always the sweetest of the lot of them! And all his life before him. Why did this have to happen? Why?’

Dolly raged and sobbed, sitting bent over their table in number three, looking as none of them had ever seen her before. Her pretty looks were mangled by grief and she seemed aged by years.

Wally was dead: twenty-one years of age and engaged to be married to Susan. He was steering the bike when the truck pulled across in front of them out of the fog and darkness on Constitution
Hill. Reggie, riding pillion, had taken the impact on his right side as the bike slewed round. He was badly injured, his right hip smashed up. They didn’t know if he would ever walk
again.

Melly sat quietly in the corner by the fire. She had barely been able to eat anything since the news came, two nights ago. She felt sick constantly. The grief around her seemed to invade her so
that she didn’t know who she was upset for most – for Dolly and Mo, for Reggie, for herself. It was as if the pain belonged to all of them and enveloped all of them.

She had never seen Gladys as emotional as she was during those days. She comforted Dolly, her old friend, but she was stunned and unable to do anything. Her face was gaunt, her eyes rimmed with
red.

‘I feel as if . . .’ She struggled to find words for Rachel and Danny. ‘I just feel as if I’ve been knocked for six.’

In a quiet moment the day after they heard, Rachel had sat Melly down, upstairs in the bedroom.

‘You know – Gladys had a little boy once.’ Melly looked at her mother’s pale face. ‘This was something she knew, but had almost forgotten. ‘I think –
what’s happened to Dolly and Mo – it’s brought it all back for her. She’s upset for them, of course – but it’s more than that. I’ve never seen her in such
a state.’

Melly nodded, her legs dangling over the edge of her bed. She didn’t know what it meant to lose your son. She just knew that all of it was wretched and terrible. Everything had changed
overnight, like a cloud blacking out the sun forever. She felt ashamed of her nerves on Christmas Day, wanting Reggie to thank her for her silly little present. Reggie could be dead now, like Wally
. . . Her eyes filled with tears.

‘Mom – is Reggie going to be all right?’

Rachel moved closer and squeezed her hand. Mom had been unusually tender with them all since the news. ‘I think so, bab. It’ll take time. I don’t know much about what’s
up with him, but he’s alive – that’s the main thing.’ She tilted her head and Melly felt her looking into her face. Mom’s eyes were red from crying, like all of
them.

‘Maybe, when he’s a bit better, you could go in and see him?’ Rachel said.

Melly looked at her in horror. Go and visit Reggie? No, she couldn’t possibly! This had taken Reggie right out of her reach. He was so much older and now, his body badly hurt, his brother
dead. How could a child like her face him – he wouldn’t want to know!

‘No.’ She shook her head and looked at her hands, holding a hanky in her lap.

‘All right,’ Rachel said gently, getting up. As if to herself, she said, ‘I wonder if he’ll be all right to get to Wally’s funeral.’

Everyone in the yard did everything they could think of to look after the Morrisons. Mo, only just sixty, turned into an old man overnight. His strong, solid body moved slowly,
with more effort, his good-natured features sagged, borne down by his suffering. His hair, already well on the way to white, took the last stage at a run.

The family stuck together. Eric, the oldest, who was married, called every day. Jonny and Freddie helped every way they could and little Donna seemed to grow up almost overnight. She became
thinner and quieter and helped Dolly about the house.

One night, just before the New Year, Rachel and Danny were lying in bed together, still awake, though it was late.

‘You don’t know what to do for them, do you?’ she said, lying in Danny’s arms. The calamity had brought them closer again. ‘If it was one of ours – I mean, I
don’t think I could stand it.’

Danny didn’t say anything, though she felt the muscles in his arms tighten around her. Sometimes it frustrated her when Danny wouldn’t talk about things, but she knew that it was his
way of keeping terrible memories at bay.

‘Sorry, Danny – does it bring it all back? Losing your mom and everything?’

When Danny and his sisters were in the orphanages – he in one, they another – his middle sister in age, Rose, died. She was only ten. The other two, Jess and Amy, eventually came
back to them, but by then they were all strangers to each other. They both had lives now, outside Birmingham, and Jess was married, but the bond between them had been broken forever. They no longer
knew where Amy was living.

‘A bit,’ he said, at last. He kissed the side of her head in the dark. ‘I s’pose all you can do is try not to think about it – when you can’t do anything, I
mean.’

‘I can’t stop thinking about it,’ Rachel said. ‘I hope to God Reggie’s going to be OK. Dolly and Mo went to see him – they said he’s in a terrible mess.
He knew them though, thank goodness.’

‘He’ll be all right,’ Danny said. ‘He’s a good strong lad.’

‘Shh – what was that?’ A sound, muffled but definite, had come from somewhere outside.

They heard it again: a cry, a howl of anguish from the inside of one of the houses. It came three times, then no more. The sound was so primal, so desolate, that it brought Rachel to tears
again.

‘That was Mo, wasn’t it?’ she whispered.

‘Must be,’ Danny said. His voice was husky as well.

‘Oh, God, Danny, the poor man,’ she wept. ‘Poor, dear old Mo.’

‘But they’re not Catholics, are they?’ Rachel said, when Gladys told her where the funeral was to be. ‘I’ve never known them go to
church.’

‘That’s what I said,’ Gladys reported. ‘But Dolly said her mom was Italian and they used to go to church as kids. Made her First Communion, white dress and all that.
After that I don’t think they bothered with it.’

‘So – we are going to go?’ Rachel asked cautiously. Her friend Netta was Catholic and Gladys who was staunch C of E had always been a bit sniffy about it, Italian mission to
the Irish and all that.

Gladys looked at her in astonishment. ‘Of course. What’re you on about? We’ll be there with our boots blacked. I wouldn’t miss going for anything, whether it’s
smells and bells or whatever it is. That’s not what matters.’

On a bitterly cold day in the fledgling new year, they filed into the church of the Sacred Heart and St Margaret Mary. Melly looked about her fearfully. Even though she went to
the parish church with Gladys most Sundays, this felt strange and different, the walls at the front of the church glowing with gold, the candles burning, the statues up near to the altar and the
smell of wax and incense. It was beautiful, not dark and frightening as she had expected.

Everyone went, Tommy as well. They took it in turns to push him the mile or so across Aston to the church in Witton Lane.

Melly was at the end of one of the wooden pews to the left, with Tommy close beside her in the aisle. Gladys was seated to her right. They could see Dolly up in front of them with her two
sisters, with little Donna and with Susan, Wally’s intended, who they could hear trying to stifle her sobs. Everyone was in black and Dolly and her sisters, like most women in the church,
were wearing black lace mantillas over their hair. Dolly had given one to Mom and Gladys to wear as well, so that they did not look out of place.

The boys were waiting at the back of the church, all in sharp black suits. The church was almost full including a group of people who, Melly realized, had worked with Wally and Reggie at GEC.
And Dolly and Mo were much loved: between them, the family knew a lot of people. But there was one person missing. Melly had seen no sign of Reggie. She wondered if he was too badly hurt to be
moved, though Dolly had said she thought he was going to come. Eric, her eldest, was to bring him in a taxi. Melly couldn’t see Eric either. She sat waiting in the hard pew, awed and
nervous.

Just when it felt as if the service must surely begin, heads turned along the middle aisle and she caught sight of Eric, pushing a wheelchair. Her heart pounded hard and she had to remind
herself to take a breath. There he was – there was Reggie! She felt ashamed of the effect seeing him had on her. He was sitting back, stiffly, and she only caught sight of the left side of
his head as Eric pushed him past and round the front pew to the side aisle, arranging the chair to Dolly’s left. Dolly leaned across for a moment to kiss him, her arm encircling the back of
the chair.

Eric walked back speedily up the aisle, head down, and Melly exchanged glances with Tommy. She felt grateful to Tommy for the sympathetic way he looked at her. Almost as if he knew what she was
feeling. For a moment she thought about holding his hand, until she remembered that he did not want her mothering him any more.

Within a moment, the organ began to play and Mo, Eric, Jonny and Freddie Morrison, with Mo’s two brothers, carried Wally’s coffin along the church and rested it on the bier in the
middle, covering it with a black velvet pall.

All the way through, the priest sprinkling the coffin with holy water, the stream of words in Latin, the incense and the sound of suppressed weeping and mutters of ‘Amen’, Melly
could not stop her gaze from returning to Reggie. She had liked Wally well enough, and he had always been around since they were all children. The sadness of it weighed upon her, for all of them,
the terrible loss and grief of the family. Reggie felt so far away now. His injuries and the death of his brother had closed about him, shutting her out. In her mind Melly tried to fold away her
feelings for him, seeing them as childish. Why had she ever thought Reggie would be interested in her? By the time the Mass was finished and they all trooped out into the grey morning, she felt
numb and cold – and older.