All The Days of My Life Read online

  By now Mary knew she had not done the top of her head properly. She had not, somehow, been able to reach right up to the parting. But, from her ears down, her hair was as untangled as she could manage. She put on her shoes and reached up to undo the bolt on the door. She was becoming frightened, already, by the massive risk she was taking, involving using up a perfectly good pair of socks. She went cold all over when, suddenly, she thought of the smacking she could get for that alone. Then she found she could not push the bolt up from its socket, and panic took over. Standing on her toes, with her heels out of the black shoes, wrestling with the bolt, she began to breathe hard and fast, on the verge of tears. She was trapped. “Oh –” she said to herself. “Oh –” thinking about Meakin Park, the gritty paths, tired London grass, with its heaps of dog dirt, grubby laurel – and “Oh –” she said again, seeing in her mind the great, green heath spread out in front of her. She fought the bolt, which was getting sticky under her fingers. Would she ever get out? What happened if you couldn’t? Would all the others get out of the train and leave her behind?

  “Oh, Mary,” wailed Cissie, outside. “You’ve gone and locked yourself in. I’ll get the blame, now.”

  Mary, in a panic with the tears stinging in her eyes, tears which she knew would make her helpless in a moment, cried, shakily, “No – I never,” and, fairly leaping in the air, managed to push the bolt up. Her heel came down painfully on to the edge of her battered, dusty, scraped black shoe. She yelped in pain as Cissie pushed the door open, knocking her on the forehead.

  “At least you look cleaner,” said Cissie, with grudging approval. “There’s a good girl. Now, come on back. Mr Burns says we’re nearly there.”

  She stood back for Mary to pass in front of her. Mary, still breathing hard, did not budge.

  “Come on,” said Cissie, impatiently.

  “You go first,” said Mary.

  “Mary.”

  But Mary just stood there. Cissie dropped her suspicious eyes slowly to Mary’s feet. “What you done with your socks?”

  “Washed my face with them,” said Mary.

  “Washed your face?” Cissie said, her voice getting higher and higher. “Washed your face? You bloody little fool – what were you thinking about? Do I need to watch you all the time – oh, I could fetch you such a clout.”

  She looked at Mary for a long, hard moment, then said, “Well – where are they?”

  “On the floor,” said Mary.

  “On the fl— oh – you haven’t the sense you were born with. Here – let me get past you.”

  And Cissie pushed in and picked the two dirty, soggy socks off the floor. She put them in Mary’s hand. “Get hold of these – you’ll have to wear them wet. And give my comb back.”

  Mary followed Cissie up the corridor and at the next open window, bent over, wiped her shoes over quickly with the socks, and tossed them out of the open window. Then, head down, with an obstinate but frightened look on her face, she followed Cissie along and sat down in the corner seat.

  Cissie, settling back, said, “Get your socks on. Then I’ll lace your shoes up. Bloody little fool,” she said to the others. “She washed her face with her socks.”

  “Where are they, Mare?” asked James Hodges.

  “What?” screamed Cissie. She craned forward to look at Mary’s feet, then Mary. “What’ve you done with your socks?”

  “Will you do up my shoes?” asked Mary.

  “Not till you tell me where those socks are.”

  “We’re slowing down,” said Ian Brent. “Look, that’s a signal box.”

  “Do them up,” said Mary, urgently. “We’re getting there.”

  “Where are those socks?” said Cissie.

  Mary was frightened. “Do them up, Cissie. Please. Please do them up.”

  “First tell me where those socks are,” said Cissie. “Or you’ll be left behind on the train when we all get out.”

  Mary broke. “I threw them out the window,” she said.

  Cissie looked at her. “Now I’ve heard everything,” she began but there was no time for more.

  “I hope you’re all ready,” said Mr Burns, looking in and passing down the corridor saying “Are you ready, Charles Grayson?” into another compartment. And, as Cissie furiously laced up the black shoes on Mary’s bare feet, the train stopped at Framlingham.

  Later, the coach driver, sitting outside the pub with his pint on the long wooden table in front of him, as a country twilight came down over the silent village street, turned to the postman and said, “I never seen anything like them evacuees when they come trooping through the barrier towards me. Nor’d old George, you could tell that from the look on his face.”

  “Oh?” said the postman, encouraging him to say more.

  The busdriver slapped at a midge and went on, “There wasn’t a decent pair of boots or shoes among them. One lad had on a pair of boots you’d have sworn were his father’s. And they’ve that pale and pasty look, you’d think they’d been brought up in the cellar. And the smell of that bus when they got out – I had to open the windows for half an hour after they’d gone. Not a proper smell, just stale, sort of, I dunno – I dunno, bad-smelling. What we’re to make of them, I’m sure. I don’t reckon they’ve got any place here. Sooner they go back home the better, if you ask me. They mean trouble, one way or t’other.”

  “They’ll soon settle in,” said the village postman, sitting there in his uniform, with his cap on the table in front of him, next to his pint. “Kids is kids anywhere you go – they’ll fit in after a bit till you can’t tell the difference.”

  “Not this lot,” said the busdriver.

  “Well, whichever way you look at it,” said the postman, “they’ve got to stop here. With the whole of London going up like a fireworks factory every night.”

  “Well – ’tis a pity,” said the busdriver.

  “We can’t turn our faces against them,” said the postman.

  “What happened to them?” said another man.

  “I just drove them to the village hall,” said the busdriver. “Left them there to get sorted out.”

  “I hear old George Twining got hold of a couple of good strong lads for the farm,” said the man.

  “Good luck to him then,” said the busdriver with emphasis. “I hope it keeps fine for him.”

  Village opinion, slow to take shape but, once set, set as hard as rock, was in the process of formation, in the douce air of the West Kent village where Mary and the other twenty-five evacuees had been sent in the summer of 1941 to escape the bombing in London.

  The children sat on the bare boards of the village hall. In front of them, on a platform, were Mr Burns and a thin lady in a green uniform, sitting at a table with a pile of papers and a vase of roses on it.

  They were very subdued. They did not know what was going to happen to them. Tumbled out of the bus by a big, florid driver, who looked at them expressionlessly as they walked past with their carrier bags and parcels of clothes, led across the village square, where huge, clumsy birds waddled across the grass from the duckpond, assailed by the smell of warm air full of pollen, unlike the air they were used to breathing, past the twitching curtains of neat houses with hedged gardens, they had been marched into the darkness of the village hall and made to sit down. Mr Burns had joined the vicar and some men and women on the platform in front of them. The lady behind the desk, her pale blonde hair combed up very neatly under her green hat, had stood up and made a speech in a voice Mary vaguely associated with the radio. Mary sat as close to her brother Jackie as she could, with Cissie on the other side.

  And then, suddenly, a pair of heavy boots, and gaitered legs, trod past her. A big hand landed on Jackie’s shoulder, a man’s voice said, “Stand up, boy.” Mary saw her brother Jackie stand up. His cocky expression faded, then came back.

  “I’ll take this lad, and this one behind him,” said the voice.

  “All right, Twining,” said the lady at the desk in her high
, very clear voice. “Mr Burns – will you give me the names?”

  “Come on then, boys, move yourselves,” said the man, and, as if in a dream, Mary felt Jackie stand up and saw Ian Brent stand too, and saw the legs of the man and two boys begin to work through the packed children’s bodies. Mr Burns said something to the lady in the front. At the table, Jackie and Ian looked around, quite bewildered. The lady wrote something in the book in front of her. The vicar spoke to Ian Brent. As the man turned to leave, with Jackie and Ian behind him, Mary, realizing the atrocity happening in the hall, jumped up and cried, “I want to go with Jackie!”

  The lady called “Twining” and the gaitered man turned round.

  Mary, standing up among the other children, stared at Jackie, who was biting his lip. “– can’t split up the family,” Mary heard the lady say.

  The gaitered man looked at Mary. “She’s too young,” he said. “If that’s the case, your ladyship, I’ll have to take another boy.”

  And the lady looked at Mary, in her maroon dress and sockless black shoes, very small and blonde, with her little face all pinched with loss, then glanced at the other children sitting round her and said, “I’ll take the little girl. Will you come with me” – and looking swiftly at her list – “Mary? You can see your brother very often. He’ll be living on the farm next door.” Mary, seeing at once her brother’s confused face, the pretty, tall lady with the pale blonde hair and clear-cut pale features, the princess in the field of daisies, and summing up all these impressions with the true instinct she was seldom to lose (demonstrating, for the first significant and perhaps most important time in her life, that tendency of hers always to accept, rather than refuse to say yes, where another person might say no), drew in a deep breath and said, “Yes, yes, please.”

  And the lady said, “Good,” and wrote something in her book. Jackie and Ian were led out into the sunshine. Mary tried not to cry and, failing, hid her sobs.

  That night she slept in a bed with a white, rose-sprigged cover in a little attic bedroom at the front of the house which looked out over the lawn, the lake and into the trees beyond, where the rooks cawed as they circled and settled for the night.

  It was her first night at Allaun Towers.

  “Bit quieter ’ere these days, wivout ’is Nibs ’anging about causing trouble,” observed Sidney Waterhouse, in a satisfied tone as he raised his foaming glass (rightly called his, for there was no other glass in the Waterhouse home) to his foaming moustache, and took a deep draught.

  “Trust you to say that,” observed his wife, Ivy Waterhouse, who was at the sink, rinsing out some smalls. “You ’aven’t got any thought for the poor little sod, miles from ’ome, ’ave you? Or little Mary, either. Oh no, you’re thinking of yourself, as usual.” She hoisted a pair of woollen pants, closer to grey than white, and then held them up, dripping into the enamel sink bowl, letting the creases drop out. Her mouth, from which the lipstick had vanished, except for the line of red marking a cupid’s bow around the edges, was turned down. Her eyes were tired. “These are going home,” she remarked, and indeed they were a sad sight, the off-white shorts, with frayed elastic waistband, and the wavering edge around the legs.

  “There’s a hole here what must make life very convenient for you,” she said, poking her finger, then two fingers, then three, through a hole between the legs. Then, seemingly irrelevantly, she said, “Beer, fags and women, that’s all you’re interested in, Sid Waterhouse, and never mind the consequences. What you do with your pants, I can’t think.”

  “No need for them in this weather, that’s what I say,” her husband remarked comfortably, sitting there in his vest, his braces dangling down the side of his blue serge trousers. “Anyway, who sees them?”

  “I don’t know who sees them,” said Ivy angrily, turning to face him. “That’s what I don’t know. I’d like to, I know that.”

  “You’re getting fanciful, love,” said Sid, taking another drink. “What you need is a nice cuddle.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Ivy, sceptically, “another mouth to feed – another lot of crying and bawling in the middle of the night and dirty nappies as if the bombing wasn’t enough. And where will you be – ’firewatching’. That’s the name for it now, isn’t it? Used to be called something else before the war.”

  She realized he was not listening to her. In her slippers, too heavy in stomach and bust for the scarlet cotton dress with tropical flowers on it, she moved from the sink to the table and, hands on splayed hips, said, “One thing’s certain, Sidney Waterhouse – from now on you can whistle for me. You can sleep in Jackie and Mary’s bed. I’m done with all that lot.”

  “We’ll see about that,” he said. “Don’t suppose you’ll ever change. Not really. Come on, love, come upstairs for a bit.”

  “Pig,” said Ivy. “You’re a pig, and that’s all. I nearly died the last time and what did you care? I could’ve bled to death – what’s in it for me, that’s what I want to know? Old Mother Green and her remedies, what nearly kill you, or a houseful of kids, that’s the choice. Oh no – you don’t get me going in for all that again.”

  “That’s what they all say,” said Sid philosophically. “Have a glass of beer.” He took a brown bottle from under the table and opened it. “Find us a cup.”

  Ivy handed him a mug with the young smiling faces of King George and Queen Elizabeth and the royal arms upon it. Sid poured the beer. She sat down opposite him at the kitchen table. She wiped the sweat from her brow and drank.

  “Why can’t you just take precautions, like other men?” she said, in a milder tone. “You don’t want me in the family way again, do you?”

  “Anyone can slip up, from time to time,” he said uncomfortably.

  “What’s a slip up to you is years of bleeding work for me,” she told him. “Oh – I’m sick of it all. This war’s getting me down.”

  Silence fell in the little hot kitchen where the flies buzzed. On the windowsill beyond the stone sink the feathery leaves of two tomato plants in earthenware pots drooped in the blistering heat. Beyond them was a small yard paved with cracked asphalt where a shirt and a dress hung motionless on a washing line in the burning heat. Then there was a low brick wall and, beyond that, another row of houses.

  “She’s at it again,” Ivy remarked lethargically, turning round to look at the back of the houses opposite. “Upstairs curtains drawn in the middle of the day.”

  “Not my business what other people do with their private lives,” said Sid. “Lucky to have the energy in this ’eat – or the chance,” he added gloomily.

  The battered kitchen clock, propped up with a matchbox where one of its legs should have been, ticked loudly in the silence. This couple, sitting in their cramped and not-too-clean kitchen, exchanging blunt matrimonial remarks, might not seem an attractive pair. Day and night Sid drove a bus from Harlesden in the West of London to Liverpool Street in the East. At dawn he might be forced to make a detour off the bus route, because it was blocked with rubble, often the remains of whole houses, sometimes the wreckage of half a street. There men and women in tin hats were often still digging out the dead and injured, where people were searching the heaps of brick, creeping beneath their broken walls to find their possessions – their cat, their dog, the remains of a baby’s pram or a bicycle which could not be replaced. Thousands had already died, thousands of houses had been destroyed in inner London alone.

  By night Sid drove his bus through the blacked-out streets of a city full of ruins where the only light was from skies beamed through by searchlights moving remorselessly to and fro, searching for enemy planes, or from fires burning at a distance. The only noise was the steady drone of bombers overhead. Frequently he stopped the bus to the wail of sirens, and ran, with the passengers, to the nearest air raid shelter. Sometimes, if no shelter was possible they crouched under the bus. When the all clear sounded, he got back in the cab of the bus, the tired passengers got in and Sid Waterhouse drove on, marking, tiredly, which buil
dings had been destroyed during the raid. At night he sometimes took his turn wearing a tin hat in the belfry of St Stephen’s waiting for the drone of enemy planes, seeing their black bodies pierce the searchlights like giant insects, watching their black eggs drop, hit the ground and turn into fire. If the raid was too close he and his friend Harry Flanders would rush down the narrow steps of the belfry into the church and shelter in the crypt. There they would crouch in darkness, hearing the air battle overhead, saving the batteries in their torches in case the church was hit and it took time to dig them out – if they could be got out. If the local bombing became too intense, either Sid or Harry Flanders would race down the belfry steps, duck along a street, bang on a door and shout, “Where’s Spot?” After a pause the door would open a crack to let out a black and white mongrel, mostly terrier, with a black patch over one eye. This dog would run beside the rescuers to the bomb site, nose through the still burning ruins and start to dig. Where Spot dug, the rescuers began their work, for he always knew where people had been buried and were still alive, in cellars and under stairs. Once he guided them to where a baby lay in its pram, in a cellar, with two lumps of masonry locked over its body, preventing a mass of rubble overhead from falling on it.

  Some nights were quiet. Sid and Harry would play cards, chat and doze. But the fatigue of busy days and interrupted nights turned Sid grey in the face. He said he did not know how he stayed on his feet.

  Meanwhile Ivy, with her ration books allowing her and Sid tiny portions of cheese and meat and two eggs a week, queued for an hour for potatoes and up to two hours for a rabbit which was not rationed. At night if heavy raids seemed likely, she took up a pack of sandwiches and a jug of tea and ran, as the sirens screamed, through the streets to the smelly station, where she bedded down on the platform, under blankets with hundreds of others who snored, tossed, groaned, giggled and muttered through the night as the raid went on overhead. Ivy, originally from the East End of London, had an uncle in the docks and useful connections all over Wapping and Limehouse. When she could, she took a bus down to the smashed areas around the docks, and generally came back with some sugar, a packet of tea or a tin of meat which some relative had got while unloading a ship. Oddly enough, the thought of death was further from Sid and Ivy’s minds than might be expected – it was sleep and a bit more food they craved.