Orphans of War (6 page)

‘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.

If only she’d met her aunt before and if only she knew where she’d be sleeping tonight. If only Mummy and Daddy could fly back at once–but they would have to go by sea and round the Cape into the Atlantic, which were dangerous water.

Maddy kept feeling so tired and sad inside since that terrible night, it was as if her feet were being dragged through heavy mud. Every little thing was an effort–brushing her teeth, washing out her clothes. Now she was wetting the bed every night and it was so embarrassing to wake up and find her pyjamas all sodden. Ivy tried hard not to be cross with her but she got so upset. Mrs Sangster would be glad to see the back of her after that.

Now this train was taking her to live with strangers in Yorkshire; a place full of chimneys and mills and cobblestones and grime. She’d seen it on the pictures. The industrial north was near where the famous Gracie Fields lived and made her films. There were terrible towns full of misery, poor children in shawls who crawled barefoot under the weaving looms. The factories belched out smoke that blackened all the houses and it rained every day like in ‘the dark satanic mills’ of Blake’s poem.

No wonder Daddy ran away from such terrible surroundings. Now that towns and cities were being blitzed, other children were being evacuated out to the country. There were lines of them on each platform
with labels on their coats, all of them carrying brown parcels, with stern-faced teachers ordering them up and down and ticking off lists.

Maddy sat in her school hat and coat, trying to be patient, but she could hear the noise outside the corridors of teachers telling their charges to hurry up and keep in line. She was squashed like a sardine in a tin, hoping the guard would remember to tell her when they reached Leeds Station, as all the signs had been taken from the platforms as a precaution in case the enemy invaded.

Peering out of her porthole only confirmed her worst fears as she saw rows of brick houses and chimneys poking up everywhere–no green fields and forests in view.

Beggars can’t be choosers, she sighed, trying to put on a brave face. She clutched Panda as if her life depended on it, her black curls poking from under her school panama hat. At least she was wearing her glasses and the eye patch was switched over to her bad eye so no one would see her squint. Her jaw was stiff and sometimes she kept shivering for no reason. She wished Mummy was here to cuddle her.

If she shut her eyes she could see Dolly Bellaire dressed for a concert in a midnight-blue sequined gown with her little fur shoulder shrug. She could almost smell the rich perfume of roses and the taste of Mummy’s lipstick when she kissed her good night. Her hair smelled of setting lotion and her fingernails were crimson. She always looked so glamorous.

At this moment, though, Maddy would have given
up her new ration books just to have an ordinary mother in a tweed suit and jacket, with a headscarf and wicker basket, going off to the shops, and a dad who worked in an office and went on the eight ten each morning into Piccadilly. But it was not to be, and she must be strong for both of them.

I need the bathroom she thought, but didn’t want the soldiers to know she was dying to pee.

‘Will you show me where the wash room is?’ she whispered to a woman sitting opposite, who smiled but shook her head.

‘We’ll both lose our seats if I do. It’s down the corridor at the end. Ask the guard.’ The thought of asking a man horrified Maddy. ‘I won’t bother,’ she snapped back. She didn’t like pushing past all those rough uniforms sitting behind the door but she didn’t want to wet herself again.

‘Will you save my seat then?’ she asked the woman, who nodded.

There was a queue when she got there and the smell of the toilet made her feel sick, but then the train stopped at a big station. Men jumped off, others clambered aboard and a woman in a funny hat shoved two children up the steps. She hugged them tightly, big tears rolling down her face.

‘Now you be good, do you hear? This big girl will take you to her teacher and look after you. This is Gloria and this is Sid. There’s a letter in her pocket. She don’t read yet.’ The lady was crying and when the whistle screeched she jumped down and ran down the platform away from the train.

The two children started to howl. The little boy was screaming for his mummy. The woman was sobbing and ran down the platform again, waving to the train as they started to chug away. The children were making an almighty racket. Maddy didn’t know what to do.

‘Shush!’ she said to the boy in the balaclava and the girl in the pixie hood. ‘You can come with me. Take my hand.’ They stared up at her with snot running down their noses. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Gloria Conley…and he’s Sid,’ said the little girl. She looked to be about eight or nine, with the brightest red hair Maddy had ever seen.

It had all happened so quickly she wondered if she’d dreamed it up. The little boy was the size of one of the tiny tots in the Sunday school class and Maddy was cross they’d been left alone. She would have to find the teacher they belonged to and get them sorted out. Perhaps the others had got on at the other end of the train and in the rush they’d got separated. It was all very strange.

Sid began to howl, ‘I want my mam!’ Gloria was trying to be brave and Maddy knew just how that felt, not having a mummy to hold on to. There was something in the look on that mother’s face that worried her. Granny Mills would’ve known what to do. She would have to take them back with her first and then get them sorted out.

Maddy sat with Sid on her knee and Gloria snuggled up to her, squashing the soldier almost out of his seat. He was not amused. She counted every stop in
her head so that she could tell the teacher just where they had got on. There were no signs on the station to help her.

Why had their mother not come with them? They were awfully small to be on their own but then she herself was not yet ten, and travelling unaccompanied. At St Hilda’s they never went anywhere without a chaperone. School seemed so far away now, another lifetime ago.

The children were neatly dressed in short woolly coats. They had gym shoes on their feet but their hair smelled of dried-up pee and boiled vegetables. Maddy tried not to wrinkle up her nose and hoped it wasn’t long to Leeds.

‘Where’re you going to?’ she asked.

‘Dunno,’ said Gloria. Maddy decided Gloria was a lovely name and she had a mop of glorious red ringlets even curlier than her own. There were freckles on her nose and cheeks and she had the greenest eyes, like a cat. Sid was just the same, only smaller.

‘You’ve got funny glasses,’ said Gloria, pointing at her patch.

‘What’s your other name again?’ Maddy said, ignoring her comment.

‘Burryl.’

‘No, your surname, Beryl what? I’m Madeleine Angela Belfield but you can call me Maddy.’

‘Just Gloria Burryl Conley.’

‘Where do you live?’

‘Dunno…’

‘You must have an address. What town…what street?’

‘Elijah Street, by the cut. Dunno owt else,’ Gloria shrugged.

This was hopeless. The stupid girl didn’t even know her address or anything. Perhaps she was simple-minded like Ivy’s cousin, Eddy, who went to a special school.

‘Well, Gloria, when the train stops at Leeds I’ll ask the guard to find your teacher,’ she offered, feeling very grown up.

‘What teacher? I’m not going to school,’ Gloria replied.

‘But you must go to school, everyone does,’ Maddy argued.

‘I don’t. Mam don’t believe in it…I look after our Sid for her,’ she said proudly. Maddy was horrified. ‘What’s your mummy’s name?’

‘Marge.’

‘And your daddy?’

‘Dain’t got none.’ Gloria pierced her with her green eyes. ‘You ask a lot of questions. Where are you going to then?’

Maddy told them at great length her own sad story. Sid had nodded off on her knee but Gloria was taking it all in. Then the train began to slow down and a whisper went through the carriage. ‘Leeds…next station.’