Orphans of War by Leah Fleming Read Free Book Online Page A

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,’ Gloriashouted, 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 featherson 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