Birmingham Blitz by Annie Murray Read Free Book Online Page A

sat by the kitchen table which was scrubbed almost white. Nan’s house was always immaculate, even with Lil’s kids living there. She still prepared all her food on the old blackleaded range which gleamed with Zebo polish. She rocked round the table from foot to foot, rattling spoons, taking the teapot to empty the dregs in the drain outside. I looked at her handsome, tired face. Always here, Nan was. Always had been, with her hair, still good and dark now, pinned up at the back. She’d always been the one who looked after everyone: Doreen this, Len that, Lil the other. Slow old Len always here, round her, until he came to us. And now she was half bringing up the next generation.
    I watched her pour the tea into two straight, white cups. There was shouting from the yard outside, getting louder, rising to shrieks. The sound of women bitching. Nan eyed the window and tutted. ‘Mary and Clarys again.’
    ‘You all right, Nan?’
    ‘As I’ll ever be.’
    I went and looked out of the door into the yard. Two of Nan’s neighbours, Mary and Clarys, were up the far end by the brewhouse, Mary with her red hair, hands on her hips, giving Clarys a couple of fishwifey earsful. Little Patsy, Tom and Cathleen had been playing round the gas lamp with another child. Usually there’d have been a whole gang of them out there. They’d stopped to watch, Tom, my favourite, swinging round the lamp by one straight arm.
    ‘Wonder what’s got into them two,’ I said.
    ‘Be summat to do with Mary’s kids again,’ Nan said. ‘Right ’andful they are.’
    The bell rang in the shop. Nan stood still, teapot in hand, listening as the door was pushed carefully shut. There were furtive footsteps on the front stairs. Morgan had arrived. His life was strung between his mom, who he lived with over his ironmonger’s shop in Aston, and his bolt-hole here. Nan carried on with what she was doing, which nowadays was exactly what she would have done if Morgan was in the same room. It was the girls who could still get under her skin, but Morgan, so far as she was concerned, was invisible, like a tiny speck of dirt. He crept in and out with an ingratiating smile on his face, and what was left of his streaks of greasy hair brushed over so they lay across his head like something fished out of a river.
    I sat back down and within minutes we heard Lil. ‘Awright, awright,’ she was saying to the kids. ‘Let me at least get in through the sodding door.’
    ‘I see them two are at it again,’ she said, flinging herself down on the horsehair sofa, in the worn cotton dress she wore to work at Chad Valley Toys. She put a hand over her eyes. ‘She wants to keep them kids in order she does. My head’s fit to split.’
    Nan handed her a cup of tea and stood in front of her, hands on hips. ‘You having second thoughts?’ There was silence. ‘’Bout sending the kids?’
    ‘No I’m not!’ Lil sat upright quick as a flash, then winced at the pain in her head. ‘I’m not having anyone else lay a finger on them. Sending the poor little mites off to fend for themselves.’
    At that moment the three ‘poor little mites’ roared in through the door at full volume. ‘Mom! Mom! – what’s to eat? We’re starving!’
    ‘Out!’ Lil yelled over the top of them. ‘Stop “Mom-ming” me when I’ve only just got in. You can push off out of ’ere till your nan says tea’s ready!’
    The room emptied again. The voices had quietened down outside but Lil’s boys started drumming a stick on the miskin-lids down the end of the yard. Lil groaned, then sat up and drank her tea, pulling pins out of her hair so that hanks of it hung round her face.
    ‘That foreman won’t leave me alone again. I’m sick to the back teeth of it.’ Lil was forever moaning about men chasing her. It was such a nuisance, the way they wouldn’t leave her alone . . . None of us believed a word. She loved every minute of it.
    Nan ignored her. ‘Victor’s gone you know. Dor was up