Living In Perhaps by Julia Widdows Read Free Book Online Page A

mornings, I suspect.
    My mother used to be a bookkeeper but when we were little she
never had a job outside the home. She kept constantly busy with
cooking and cleaning and knitting and sewing. She knitted all my
jumpers, and Brian's, and she knitted thick winter socks for Dad.
She sewed my dresses.
    'Isn't she clever, your mum?' my aunt Gloria often said to me,
holding up an unrecognizable slab of knitting, destined to
become a pocket or a sleeve. Another trick of hers was to lift the
skirt of the dress I was wearing, to admire the tiny hem stitches.
'Auntie!' I pushed at my skirt, trying to hide my knickers from the
company. 'Please!'
    'I could never do all that, Edie. I really couldn't. Such patience.'
    Gloria's humility was put on to increase the compliment, but I
saw my mother's look: no, you couldn't.
    The only other child in our family was Mandy, Bettina's
daughter. I envied Mandy her shop-bought dresses with their
machine-finished buttonholes and narrow machine-stitched
hems. Sometimes Mandy wore dresses identical to those I'd seen
other girls in, flimsy checked frocks with gathered skirts and
sashes, daisy prints with puffed sleeves. My dresses were never the
same as anyone else's. My mother used patterns that had been
around for years, and then gave them a twist of her own: lasting
quality. They had big hems, with 'lots to let down'. They were
never skimpy, and the buttonholes never came unravelled. But I
longed for a frock that was up-to-the-minute, shoddy as only
shop-bought products could be, and then tatty enough to be
chucked away. Even Mandy's cardigans were made on a machine:
the automated sheen of their surfaces was thrilling. I wished mine
could be like hers.
    One day when we were going past our local wool shop I noticed
in the window a pale green cable-knit jumper very like the one
Mum was currently making at home. 'Look,' I said. 'That's just like
the one you're knitting.'
    'It is ,' she said. At first I thought she meant 'It's the pattern I'm
using.' But when we got home, I noticed that the pale green wool
had gone from her needles and been replaced by brown yarn for
my next school cardigan.
    'Where's the green one?' I asked. 'Who's it for?'
    'At the shop,' she said. 'It's for whoever buys it.'
    And that was the start of her new job, her home knitting career.
    Mum liked us out of the way while she was doing this, concerned
that our mucky fingers would spoil the goods. Just as she
liked us off her clean kitchen floor, away from her plumped-up
settee cushions and smoothed bedspreads. Just as Dad liked us
out of the flower beds with that ball, and off the nice sharp edges
of his lawn. We couldn't put a foot right.
    My new friend Hanny Gombrich is Jewish. That was the second
thing she told me, after her name. We met in the gardens here,
where we're allowed out for an hour in the morning (weather
permitting), and again in the afternoon. I knew she wasn't a
zombie that first time because I caught her eye. Everyone else here
avoids meeting eyes. Or they're too drugged-up to be capable of
noticing you. I caught her eye and she looked back at me for – it
must have been – all of three seconds. It was such a relief. It was
like a hand reaching out and pulling you up out of a deep, deep
well.
    So she said hello and told me her name, and when I raised my
eyebrows (I couldn't help it, it wasn't the kind of name I'd come
across before) she explained, a bit curtly, that she was Jewish. I
said I hadn't ever met anyone Jewish before.
    'Where have you been all your life!?' she cried, so I said maybe
I had met some but I just didn't know it. Then she made a noise
in her throat and laughed. She said it was the noise her grandmother
made when she was being disparaging about goyim –
that's the rest of us.

8
Next Door
    'Come round to our house,' Barbara said one day.
    These were the words I'd been waiting for, for months. She had
found me slouching home from school, towing my more or less
empty satchel as if it was a bag