Katie shuddered. ‘They were always going to come to a bad end. Disgusting, the whole lot of them.’
‘In fact Molly’s doing very well,’ Em said defiantly. ‘She’s in the army, in ack-ack – in Belgium. And they’ve promoted her to Lance Corporal. You’d be surprised if you saw her now.’
Katie raised her eyebrows. ‘Goodness! Well, there’s room for all sorts in the army, I s’pose.’
They both fell silent.
‘Well,’ Em said, hurt all over again. ‘I’d better get on.’
To her surprise, Katie then gave a genuine smile, which lit up her face. This was more like the old Katie that Em remembered. ‘It was nice to see you, Em. I’m glad everything’s going all right for you.’
Em found herself smiling back, remembering what fun Katie had been at times. She longed for them to sit down somewhere, with an afternoon to while away with cups of tea, and tell each other everything about their lives. But she could see that wasn’t going to happen.
‘Thanks,’ she said, surprised to find a sudden lump in her throat. ‘Bye then. Don’t make yourself late for work.’
She watched as Katie walked away, seeming so familiar, yet with a closed air of mystery about her. What had happened to her in all this time? Em saw, sadly, that she barely knew Katie O’Neill at all.
1931
Katie crept up to the front door, biting her lower lip as she unfastened the latch, praying that the door wouldn’t creak and give her away. She clicked it shut and stood behind it, screwing her eyes tightly shut. Please don’t let Mother have heard her come in! If only she could have a few minutes – all she wanted to do was run up to her room, bury her face in her pillow after what she had just done, after what Mother had
made
her do.
But of course her mother’s ears were sharp as a cat’s.
‘Katie, is that you down there?’
‘Yes,’ she called faintly. Sometimes it felt as if Mother knew everything that was going on in her head.
‘Come up here – now, please. You’ve kept me waiting.’
Katie climbed the two flights of stairs, the first flight covered in brown linoleum, the attic stairs just bare boards. Her white ankle socks were the only bright thing in the gloom, left, right, left, right, her long black plaits swinging as she climbed, past the two rotten treads that groaned when you stepped on them. She felt like groaning too.
Her mother, Mrs Vera O’Neill, turned as she reached the attic, taking her brass thimble from her finger. Vera had been sitting working in the remaining light from the window. As she swivelled round, her face was in shadow so that Katie could only make out her outline. This made her even more forbidding than usual, the ramrod-straight back, the well-built body, simply but elegantly clad, her thick, golden brown hair swept up and piled on her head in the same style her own mother might have worn. There was nothing modern about Vera O’Neill. Katie could just see the gleam of pins that she had pushed for safekeeping through the collar of her green cardigan. On the work table behind her could be seen the black Singer machine, the glint of scissors, reels of thread and the length of grey serge on which she was working.
‘And did you do as I asked?’ Even though she couldn’t see her mother’s face, Katie knew it wore that look which always made her feel bad and guilty. How could she do anything to displease Mother, whose life was made up of Grief and Suffering? Vera’s voice was smooth and well spoken, the Birmingham accent almost completely schooled out of her long ago, in a private establishment in Edgbaston. However much she had been reduced to living in poverty, Vera O’Neill made it clear with every ounce of her that this was not where she had started off in life, nor did she belong here.
‘Yes,’ Katie said again. She stood with her hands clasped in front of her, feet neatly together, as Mother – woe betide her if she ever called her Mom – liked her to do. Vera was like a puppet master: she liked to be in control.
‘Good girl. I hope you made yourself quite plain. And you keep away from Emma Brown at school. I don’t want you associating with people like that.’
‘But,’ Katie dared protest, ‘isn’t Mrs Brown just a bit poorly, a bit like Uncle Patrick is a bit poorly sometimes? Won’t she get better?’
And she’s my friend
, she wanted to cry.
Her mother seemed to swell in the gloom so that Katie would have taken a step backwards, had she dared. Vera O’Neill leaned forward.
‘Now listen to me,’ she hissed. ‘You do not speak about your uncle and that Mrs Brown in the same breath, d’you hear? You’re talking about your father’s brother – it’s not the same thing at all! Uncle Patrick has a troubled nature, it’s true, but he’s of sound mind and don’t you ever,
ever
tell anyone otherwise. He’s never been sent to the asylum, has he?’ She sat back again, steely and imposing. ‘Anyone who gets sent to the asylum is a different kettle of fish altogether, and they don’t come out again in a hurry. We don’t want anything else to do with people like that, do you understand?’
Katie nodded. Their superiority over everyone around had been drummed into her.
‘Good.’ Her mother’s tone lightened for a moment. ‘Now, you said you’ve found a new friend at school to play with – is it Lily?’
‘Lily Davies. She’s . . .’ She’s all right, Katie wanted to say. Not as much fun as Em, though. Sometimes she thought her mother didn’t really want her to have friends at all – she wanted her all to herself, at her beck and call. ‘Yes, she’s nice.’
‘And she sounds as if she comes from a good family – for round here anyway. There, so that’s all settled. I know it seems harsh, dear, but it does count, who you associate with. It forms your character. We shan’t be here forever – as soon as we can, we’ll move somewhere much better. You’ll thank me in the end, I promise you.’
Katie nodded, trying to swallow down her tears. She couldn’t keep from her mind the mucky state of the Browns’ house, and of Em herself. And the wretched sight of Em’s face when Katie had handed over the cruel verdict: ‘Mom says she doesn’t want me having anything to do with you . . . She says it ain’t right (why had she said “ain’t”, if not to defy her mother!) the way she’s gone and left you. She says your mom’s not right in the head . . . that I’m not to be friends with you.’
Worse even than the cruel words, the hurt they painted on Em’s face, was the glimmer of enjoyment that Katie knew she’d had in saying them. In those moments she’d felt high above Em.
We’re better than you
. . . And now she was sorry and she hated herself for it.
In a thick voice, she said, ‘It ain’t Em’s fault, ar it?’
‘I
beg
your pardon?’ her mother said ominously.
‘It’s not,’ she corrected. ‘It’s not Em’s fault.’
‘No, it’s not,’ Vera O’Neill agreed. ‘Not directly. But what’s bred in the bone comes out in the flesh. She’ll be tarred with the same brush in the end. You keep away from them, do you hear? Now – I need to finish this before the light goes. As you know, I have to work very hard to keep us. Now off you go.’ And she turned, bending her elegant head back over her work table.
Freed at last, Katie hurried down to the little room she shared with her mother and flung herself face down on her bed.
‘See,’ she muttered, as if Em was in front of her. ‘Mom says your mom’s a loony – that’s why I had to do it. A mad, stinking loony, so there!’ And then she burst into tears.
Kenilworth Street, in an old district just to the northeast of the centre of Birmingham, had only been their home for just over a year. Before that Katie had been to St Joseph’s Roman Catholic School, near where they had lived off Thimble Mill Lane, about a mile away. So far as Katie was concerned, things had been happy enough there. She’d made friends and done well. But her mother had suddenly announced that they were moving, and before the school year was even finished she had been snatched away and landed up in Kenilworth Road, in a new class at an ordinary council school where there were no crucifixes or statues.
‘Your uncle has found us a more suitable house,’ her mother told her. ‘We need to leave immediately.’
It was true that the house had an attic room, unlike the last one they’d been living in, but otherwise it didn’t seem much better. To Vera’s shame, it still backed onto a house that faced into a yard, which meant walking round and sharing the communal toilets. Vera, who hadn’t seen the house before they moved, was furious.
‘I told you – I want a house with its own privy!’ she ranted at Uncle Patrick. ‘How could you? You know how I feel about having to associate in this horribly intimate way!’
‘I’m sorry, Vera,’ Patrick said, in his usual gentle, sagging way. ‘But it is a better house than before – there’s a room for you to work in, and the rent’s not much more, either.’
‘Well, I suppose we’ll just have to put up with it – for now,’ Vera snapped.
Katie, then aged seven, didn’t question anything. Her mother was not someone to argue with, and it just seemed the way things were. When she asked about seeing her friends from St Joseph’s, since they weren’t an impossible distance away, Vera said sharply, ‘There’s no need to keep up with those people. You’ll soon make new friends. And pray to God we shan’t be here long in any case.’
Vera O’Neill was always keen to remind Katie that she hadn’t spent all of her eight years in such a poor place.
‘When your father was still alive we lived in a much better neighbourhood,’ she would say. The time
before –
that is, before her father, Michael O’Neill, contracted TB and died, when she was not yet two and a half years old – was always spoken of as a lost golden time, like the time in the Garden of Eden, before anyone had come across any talking snakes or apples. It sounded very nice to Katie. She had only the vaguest memories of her father, but they were good ones, warm ones of being held, and his death felt like the gateway into loneliness.
But for her now, this was home: the constant whiff of the gas works at Windsor Street, the whistle of trains going in and out of the shunting yard, the great chimneys of the power station looming behind the long skeins of sooty brick houses and the equally sooty brick edifice of Cromwell Street School. And going to school – because she lived at number six and the Browns lived at number eighteen – had always meant calling for Em on the way. But not any more.
She woke the next morning from a broken night’s sleep and a dream of seeing Em at the Browns’ green front door, of them both smiling and linking hands and everything being all right. She woke with a terrible ache in her chest.
And now she was going to have to walk past Em’s door on the way to school, without knocking for her.
But by the time she had dressed and tried to swallow down the porridge that her mother insisted on her having, she had worked herself up into a different mood. She was full of confusion – but she had to obey Mother. So she put on all her pride. Wasn’t it true that Em’s family was a bit rough? Some of the things her brother Sid came out with! And Bob, her dad there with his stubbly cheeks, coming home all covered in coal dust from the power station! But Katie ached to have a father, like all those other children who waited for them outside the pubs in ragged shorts and with grubby knees, knowing there was a dad in there who, in the end, would come out to them. And it had been lovely seeing Em’s baby sister Violet – Katie had felt very jealous. If only she had a baby sister to play with! And a house with other brothers and sisters, and all sorts going on. But then, as Mother had pointed out, some people round here bred like rabbits, having all these children they couldn’t afford to feed. Maybe she and Em shouldn’t have been friends after all, she told herself. It had only been because there was nobody better. Now Lily Davies had come along – and she only had one older sister – Katie could have a friend who was more like her.
She set out along Kenilworth Street in the chilly morning with her head held high. As she approached the Browns’ house she saw that the lady across the road, Jenny Button, who ran her little bakery from her front room, was out cleaning her step. Jenny was a very corpulent lady and knelt down with a grunt, took her scrubbing brush from her pail of water and called out, ‘Morning, bab!’
‘Good morning!’ Katie called softly, not wanting her voice to carry as far as Em’s house. She kept facing away from number eighteen, her whole body tingling with dread in case the door opened and Em should come out on the way to school.
But Em did not come out. Em had first stopped coming to Girls’ Life Brigade, which they’d done together before, and lately she’d been absent from school a lot. When Katie had called for her, Em would say miserably, ‘I’m stopping at home today.’
As she passed by, out of the corner of her eye Katie saw Molly Fox come out of the entry to the yard near Jenny Button’s shop. She could tell it was Molly from her thick, blonde hair. The Foxes lived on one of the back yards, where five or six jerry-built houses would be constructed facing inwards, sharing three or four toilets at the end, a communal wash-house with a copper and a mangle for laundry and usually a stinking pile of ash and refuse. Molly’s house was not that different from the one Katie was living in, which had one room and a scullery downstairs, two small rooms on the first floor and an attic. But while the O’Neills’ house faced the street and backed onto another house, the Foxes’ was built hard up against the wall of a factory. And like the other houses in that particular yard, it was in a wretched condition.