War Babies (39 page)

Melly solemnly took this in. Then she said, ‘You should have stayed here, not gone there.’

He gave a shy laugh again. ‘Yes – I should.’

‘You’re a big girl now, Melly,’ Rachel said. ‘When your dad left you were only a babby.’

‘Was Tommy a babby?’

‘Tommy wasn’t born then.’

Hearing his name mentioned, Tommy was making little excited noises. Danny looked at him, and Rachel saw his eyes cloud with confusion.

‘Does he know what we’re saying?’

‘He does,’ Gladys said, bringing some bread to the table. On her way back she bent over Tommy. ‘You know what we’re saying, don’t you, Tommy lad?’ She prodded
his tummy and the boy squirmed and chuckled, his tongue pushing out of his mouth so that a trail of saliva swam down his chin.

‘He’s all there, Danny,’ Rachel said quietly. ‘I know he is – whatever they say about him. And he loves other children – Melly and Cissy, and my friend
Netta’s kids. He’s just got some trouble with his body – his legs.’

Danny nodded, staring warily at his son. He put his head down and ate his porridge.

The rain cleared by the afternoon and everyone emerged. Danny was the toast of the yard that day. Dolly hugged him and patted his head like one of her own. Even Ma and Pa
Jackman seemed pleased to see him and Lil Gittins exclaimed loudly over him as if he was a pet lamb.

‘Your feller’s back then?’ Irene said, sidling up to Rachel as she stood behind Tommy’s chair which she had wheeled into the yard. Tommy was well wrapped up and he liked
to be with everyone.

Irene, with her bleach-blonde hair and very tight, low-cut blue dress with a belt that more than showed off her curves, seemed to dress every day like a seductress. Pity she doesn’t spare
a bit of time for her kids instead of preening, Rachel thought sourly. Then she thought, God, I’m turning into one of those moaning old bags. But she didn’t have much time for Irene
these days.

‘Yes, he’s been fighting for his country – in India and Burma,’ she announced, adding caustically, ‘not like some.’

Irene, who she guessed had no idea where either of those countries was, said, ‘Fancy.’ Rachel saw her eyes taking Danny in. Although he was very thin, his shoulders were much broader
and stronger than when he left and his tanned face and short hair made him look even more handsome. Compared with Ray Sutton who, despite his film-star appearance, now had a drinker’s belly
and a dissipated look to his face, Rachel thought her Danny was far more fit and good-looking. She felt a swell of pride.

‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘He’s been right round the world. Seen all sorts. He’s a proper
man
,’ she said, as if to emphasize her view of Ray Sutton as a
pygmy in comparison.

Irene folded her arms at this and looked fed up. ‘Each to their own,’ she said grumpily.

‘Come on, Danny – get yerself down the pub for a pint or two!’ Mo commanded, standing in their doorway. ‘You’re a man now, lad, no good sitting at
home with the wenches all your life! It’ll send you soft in the ’ead!’

Danny grinned, clearly pleased.

‘What’re you going to do now you’re back then?’ Mo said as Danny got up to fetch his cap. ‘Back on the markets?’

‘I dunno,’ Danny said. ‘I might. My army pay’ll tide us over for a week or two.’ He looked at Rachel and Gladys. ‘All right if I go?’

‘Go on,’ Rachel said. ‘Go and see the lads.’ She was secretly glad that she would be able to get Tommy off to bed without Danny sitting waiting for her downstairs. To her
enormous relief Tommy seemed to have settled in the other bed, probably because he still had his sister with him.

‘Did he wake up?’ she asked Melly.

‘He woke a little bit,’ she reported. ‘Two times. And I gave him a pat, like you said, and he went back to sleep.’

‘There’s a good girl,’ Rachel said, full of warm gratitude for her responsible little daughter. ‘You’re such a help to me, Melly. You’re a real good
girl.’

‘Come on, lad –’ Mo hauled Danny out with an arm around his shoulders. ‘You come down the boozer with me and see the lads – we’ll have you in a job of work by
the time you get home again!’

After all the years of longing and waiting, Rachel found those first weeks after Danny’s homecoming a bitter disappointment.

‘He might take a while to settle,’ Gladys had tried to warn her. Gladys had seen it all before with the men coming home after the last war. But Rachel had not been able to imagine
this, or anything other than Danny coming home and just being the Danny she had known before. And she desperately needed to lean on him, for him to be a strong support for her.

As it was, she spent her days with a sick feeling from all the tension building up inside her. Danny drifted in and out, sometimes almost his old self, but a lot of the time seeming distant and
cut off from them all. Sometimes she almost forgot he was home. She felt just as burdened by everything as before, but with the additional pain of this lack in her husband.

Within a few days of his return, Dolly Morrison came round to tell Danny that a Mr Rose along the street was looking for a worker in his watch-repair business.

‘That sounds all right,’ Rachel said brightly. ‘You keep saying you don’t want to work in a big factory, don’t you, Danny?’

Danny was, as usual, sitting by the fire, smoking and staring at nothing. ‘Yeah. All right.’

‘He’s a nice old gentleman,’ Dolly said with a glance at Gladys that said,
Oh dear, this doesn’t look too good.
‘Says his eyes are failing him now. But
he’s happy to take on someone who’s been fighting for King and country.’

‘Huh.’ Danny gave a cynical snort.

The three women all looked at each other. Rachel’s eyes filled with tears and she saw Dolly notice this.

‘Eh, Danny, come on,’ Dolly said, sinking onto a chair as if the weight of her swollen belly was too much for her. ‘You know you might feel a bit better for getting out and
doing some work, bab. No good sitting here with nowt to do. That’d make anyone feel a bit blue.’

‘I’ll do it,’ Danny said, an edge of irritation in his voice. ‘I said I would, dain’t I?’

Any hint of anyone telling him what to do and he was full of rage. Rachel found this when she tried to explain to him how to deal with Tommy. One night she had been showing him how she strapped
Tommy’s braces on. When she corrected something he was doing, he stormed out of the house in a rage. He came back later and lay in her arms, sorry by then, and upset.

‘I dain’t mean it – I don’t know why I feel so pent up the way I do . . . I know you’ve had it bad, Rach – I just don’t know what to do . . .’
None of it was making life easier. Melly moved around him with great caution, as if he was some sort of wild animal with claws that might lash out. At times Rachel found herself wishing powerfully
that he had never come home.

Danny went to work with Mr Rose in the front room of his little terraced house. Mr Rose began to teach him all he knew about watch mechanisms and jewellery repair. Danny
pointed him out to Rachel in the street one day and she saw a slightly stooped man with silver-grey hair and a neat beard, walking with the aid of a stick. She immediately liked the look of Mr
Rose. He had a strong-featured, sympathetic face.

‘There you are, my boy!’ He raised the stick in a wave.

‘All right, Mr Rose?’ Danny said, appearing to be shy of him.

They were out with the children. Danny had been very unsure about going out with Tommy in that ramshackle chair. ‘You don’t take him out, do you – in that?’ he said in
horror.

‘Yes, Danny – I do,’ Rachel retorted, in a voice of such fierce finality that he did not dare argue. ‘For one thing he’s too big for the pram and Dolly’s
going to need it back. This’ll have to do for now – I’m not having him shut away like a prisoner for things he can’t help. If other people don’t like it, they’ll
have to put up with it.’

But she could see that Danny was embarrassed when Mr Rose came over.

‘So this is your family, Daniel?’

Rachel was startled, never once having heard him called by his proper name before. Mr Rose had a very nice voice, she thought, deep and well spoken. He seemed a refined sort of man.

Danny nodded, introducing Rachel. She shook Mr Rose’s small, cool hand. He shook hands with Melanie too.

‘Hello, little Melanie,’ he said. ‘What a pretty name.’ Melly beamed up at him, enchanted by this elderly stranger.

‘And your boy?’ Mr Rose looked down at Tommy, a kindly light in his eyes. ‘He has some problem with his legs?’

Rachel saw Danny look away, as if detaching himself from the situation.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He was born with bad legs. He can’t walk.’ She felt tearful at the sight of the sheer benevolence in the old man’s eyes.

‘That is a difficult thing,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘And not easy for his mother either.’ He looked at her. ‘You know . . .’ He moved a fraction closer.
‘I had a cousin who was much like this. Can he speak?’

‘No – well a bit. But he understands—’

Mr Rose raised a hand as if she had said something very important. ‘Understands – exactly, my dear! You must never think, as so many do, that poor muscles in the body mean a brain
that does not tick along like the finest of clocks! My aunt – she worked and worked with our cousin Sam. And he was such a lively boy, you know, when they took some time with him. He died
young, alas, of influenza – only made twenty-five or so. But they took trouble with him and he learned, he responded. I know it is not easy.’ He smiled down at Tommy. Danny turned to
watch. ‘Hello, little fellow.’

Tommy’s eyes lit up and he made a happy sound and squirmed with happiness, his mouth working.

‘That’s “Hello”, I think!’ Rachel laughed.

‘There you are, you see – a mother always knows!’ Mr Rose patted Danny’s shoulder. ‘You have a fine family, my boy. You are very lucky.’

However, Danny worked for Mr Rose for only nine days before coming home saying he had packed the job in.

‘
What?
’ Rachel erupted, more upset because Mr Rose had been so kind than she would have been about any other job. ‘But why? He’s such a nice old man as
well.’

Danny shrugged resentfully. ‘I’ve just had enough. There’s other jobs. I haven’t
got
to stay there.’

He told her that Mr Rose had sat him down, when he said he was leaving, and given him a lecture about how he would never get anywhere in life if he didn’t stick at something, a rolling
stone and so on. This seemed to have made Danny even more determined to leave.

‘Well, I suppose there are other jobs,’ Gladys said, trying to smooth things over, as she could see how upset Rachel was. ‘And you can come up the market and help me again,
Sat’d’y.’

Later, she said to Rachel, ‘He’s like a lost soul. Tell you what – I’ll take him over to see Jess and Amy on Sunday. Change of scene. That might perk him up a
bit.’

‘All right,’ Rachel said, alarmed at the extent of the relief she felt that Danny would be out for the day. ‘I might take the littl’uns over to Mom’s – she
hasn’t seen them in a while.’

Tommy’s stiff legs would not wrap around her hip so she had to carry him in front of her, cradled in a blanket. He was not too heavy yet but it still tugged at her back
and she was very relieved when a man gave her his seat on the tram into town.

‘You look as if you need it more than I do, bab,’ he said kindly.

Melly stood beside them holding on tight and Tommy enjoyed sitting on Rachel’s lap, gazing around at everything. His legs were hidden in the blanket, but his arms were free and his bad
left arm was clenched close to his body. As he looked about him, excited by being out, his mouth kept opening and his tongue sliding out and in again. Rachel could see people looking at him, then
away, wondering. But on the trolleybus out to Hay Mills, a woman sitting right behind them started making observations to her neighbour with no attempt to lower her voice.

‘It’s not right, bringing them out where everyone can see them. It’s not nice.’

There was a pause, until the other one said, ‘He’s not a bad-looking child really. It’s a shame.’

‘All the same,’ her friend said in an officious tone. ‘There are homes for oddities like that. We don’t need to see them. She ought to have more shame.’

Rachel clenched her hands hard on Tommy’s blanket, so tight inside with outrage that she could hardly breathe. She saw Melly looking at her sharpened knuckles, then up at her face with
wide eyes. Melly knew the woman was talking about her brother. Rachel looked at her daughter’s solemn face, then away out of the window. Nasty, ignorant old cow! she raged to herself. She
ought to be used to it by now, she thought. But could you ever get used to it – to the feeling of being stabbed by people’s stupid, cruel words? The hurt, angry, protective feelings
flamed in her on Tommy’s behalf every time. And it was not as if her own mother was any better. Getting off the bus in the Coventry Road, still breathing shallow, upset breaths, she prepared
herself for Peggy.

‘Oh – it’s you,’ Fred Horton said, without enthusiasm, opening the door. The top buttons of his shirt were undone, his jacket swinging open, and he
looked half-asleep. ‘We weren’t expecting you. You’d better come in. Sidney’s coming over later.’

Oh, I’ll be long out of here by the time
he
comes round, Rachel vowed, following her stepfather’s burly figure upstairs to the flat. To her great disappointment, the Germans
had not succeeded in depriving her of her stepbrother. He was back, full of himself and soon to be married. Peggy had mentioned that Rachel must come to the wedding with Melly – but of
course, not Tommy. She was determined not to go at all.

‘Oh – Rachel,’ Peggy said, rousing herself in her chair by the fire. ‘I thought it might be you – though it’d be nice if you gave us warning. You could send
me a postcard if you’re coming.’

‘Yes, I s’pose I could,’ Rachel said, without the intention of doing anything of the sort. Was her mother planning to pay for the stamp? she wondered sourly, sitting down with
Tommy on her lap. She winced at the pain in her back.