All the Days of Our Lives (22 page)

Rounding a corner, she almost collided with someone. They both stepped back, their eyes meeting for a fleeting moment, then hurried on.

‘Sorry!’ the other person called.

It only sank in as she continued along the road: the voice, the pale face she had seen in the dusk. It had been Em – taller and older, but otherwise just the same and immediately recognizable. It had been her, hadn’t it? Emma Brown. All she could remember of the last time she saw Em was a haunted figure in the street when her mother was poorly, hurrying here and there with no time to stop and join in the other children’s games. She ached to think of Em in those days, how skinny and sad she had looked, and how cruel she had been to her.

Sitting on the tram from town to Balsall Heath, looking out at the dark streets, Katie felt very low. She’d lost her father, Uncle Patrick and then Em – and now both Simon and her mother. Was she cursed or something? Was there never going to be anyone she could love who would stay with her? She held Michael close and tight.

‘You won’t leave me, will you?’ she whispered.

He slept on, with complete trust.

Calais, June 1946

‘Molly – are you awake?’

Molly’s eyes flickered open in the dark Nissen hut. For a second she was confused. She had slept in so many wooden army huts that she could have been anywhere. Her head felt heavy and her mind dull, as if she had had no sleep at all. Close by she made out her friend Cath’s outline, half sitting up in the next bed.

‘I am now,’ she muttered drowsily. ‘What time is it?’

‘Almost five. Sorry if I woke you, but we’ll have to be getting up in a tick anyway.’

‘Sounds as if the wind’s dropped?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

All night a gale had blown, buffeting the hut so that it felt as if it might lift off the ground and be tossed away. They all had high hopes of crossing the Channel first thing that morning, and as Molly listened it did sound as if the wind had calmed.

By eight o’clock they had been at the quayside for half an hour waiting to embark. Around them rose a buzz of excited chatter from this contingent of ATS and a sprinkling of WAAF girls, some of the number who had volunteered for postings to Belgium in 1944 and were now being demobbed. Molly knew that Cath shared their excitement, though she faced a good deal of uncertainty. Her family were in Ireland and she had long left them behind. Instead of returning there, she had decided to wait in London for Derck, her Dutch fiancé, to be released from the army as well. She and Orla, another ATS girl, were planning to try and find digs together. It was going to be very sad to say goodbye.

In fact Molly was anything but excited. A heavy dread filled her, making her feel queasy, on top of the poor night’s sleep. She stood on the quay in that steel-grey morning with her kitbag and the old case with leather straps she had bought in Birmingham before she joined up. Holding tight to the well-worn, familiar handle of the case that had travelled so far with her, it felt at that moment like her only friend in the world. She lit a cigarette, smoked one, then another.

The crossing was calm and quite pleasant, and Molly managed to keep her spirits up while she was still with Cath. The two of them, and Orla, went and walked up and down the deck, looking out over the sea.

‘I still can’t take it in,’ Cath said, her eyes reflecting the grey water. Even her wayward auburn hair looked subdued under the heavy clouds. ‘We’re actually leaving the army – it’s over. I don’t know if I’m sad or glad.’ She took Molly’s arm and squeezed it. ‘I’ll be glad when I see Derck’s lovely face smiling at me, I know that. But my God I’ll miss you, Molly. You’ve got to promise me we’ll keep in touch, now? Are you sure you won’t change your mind and come and stop in London with us?’

‘Oh no – ta,’ Molly said. ‘And of course I’ll keep in touch, you daft thing.’

She was tempted to go and try for a life in London with Cath, but she just knew it didn’t feel right. Had it just been Cath it might have been different, but with both the Irish girls, she felt three was a crowd. And then Cath had her future with Derck and would be gone. Molly found the thought of London overwhelming. Her only memories of it were such painfully sad ones. Tony, the man she had loved when they met at a training camp on the Welsh coast, had been killed in London by an unexploded bomb that had been concealed in a nearby house. London, for Molly, was a place of grief and death.

She had, at that moment, absolutely no idea what she was going to do next with her life.

Even the train ride to the demobilization centre was fraught with painful memories. As chance would have it, they were to be processed at a Release Centre in Birmingham and had to travel up out of Euston, a journey that Molly also associated with Tony and what, for her, had been the darkest days of the war. And Birmingham, although the place she came from, was somewhere she would have been happy never to see again.

As they had so much kit and most of the girls were eventually heading for all sorts of different destinations, they were allowed to leave some of their luggage at Euston.

‘You’ll be taking all yours, though, won’t you, Molly?’ Orla asked, knowing that Birmingham had been her home.

Molly looked down at the case and khaki kitbag. In that split second she knew she was making a crucial decision. If she took all her luggage north to the Midlands, she knew somehow that she was opting for that – to go home to Brum. And her whole being rebelled against this. What was there in Birmingham for her. Her mother? God alone knew what state she’d be in by now. And the ghost of her brother, hanged by the neck, as well as the ghosts of her own childhood. Oh no, thanks very much, she thought.

‘I’ll only take overnight stuff up there,’ she said. ‘The rest can stay here.’

She saw Cath and Orla look at each other.

‘But, Molly . . .’ Cath began. She was going to ask once again:
What are you going to do?

‘I don’t
know
,’ Molly snapped, before Cath even got the words out.

Their company distracted her from her thoughts for the next few hours. On arrival in Birmingham they were met by an army truck, which took them south again to Wythall, where they saw the huts of what looked like an army camp, but was in fact the exit door from the army. Molly found it all comforting, as she found all the orderly ways of the army comforting. They were given a meal and a bed and told to sort out what kit was to be handed in and what they were keeping. The next morning was a rush of activity, as the staff seemed to want to shift them through as fast as possible. They had to hand in their kit and be issued with their demob book, railway warrants and clothing coupons.

And then it really was over. Molly travelled back with the others to New Street Station to say goodbye to Cath and Orla, who were going straight back to London. Already everything felt strange, each of them squeezed into old civilian clothes that they had outgrown in every way. Molly’s skirt felt uncomfortably tight round the waistband. None of them had yet had time to take their coupons and choose new ones. In the busy, echoing station, Cath hugged Molly warmly and looked at her in a worried way.

‘Where
are
you going to go, Molly?’

Molly smiled bravely. ‘Tonight I’m going to go and see a pal of mine. After that – I don’t know. I’ll keep you posted. Now’ – her voice was turning gruff with coming tears – ‘go on, the pair of yer, sod off or you’ll miss it. You take care of each other.’

‘We will!’ they laughed, and they all hugged again and said TTFN, not somehow able to bear the word ‘goodbye’, and tried – not very successfully in Cath and Orla’s case – not to cry. Then the two of them boarded their train, waving until it gathered speed along the platform and Molly couldn’t see their tearful faces any more.

Only then did the great well of sadness waiting inside her reach up into her eyes.

Molly had joined up early in 1941 to get away from her family. Her childhood in Birmingham had been poor and full of suffering at the hands of her drunken mother, Iris, and sexually predatory grandfather, William Rathbone. Just before Molly joined the army, Iris had told her, with a sadistic kind of pleasure, that William Rathbone – the man whom she had loathed as a grandfather – was also her father, since he had also preyed upon Iris, his daughter. This news along with the fact that Bert, her thieving, cheating brother, lived with them had led Molly almost to a state of despair, which she hid from herself by drinking heavily. She was a big, attractive blonde who always had men buzzing round her, but her relationships with them usually turned sour. On those sickening, hungover mornings when she looked in the murky mirror in her bedroom with a splitting head, she had known that she was beginning to go the same way as her mother.

The army had saved her, given her a place to belong, where she felt safe and where, at least for some of the time, she was recognized as being capable of things – of far more than she had ever dreamed. She had wanted it to go on forever.

But now it was over. There would be a few ATS continuing work for a time, but after that the army would only be for men again. A terrible kind of silence seemed to fill Molly even as she walked through the busy railway station. She made her way slowly out to New Street, oblivious to everything around her, the bomb-damaged streets, the people who weaved around her. All she could see was the greyness of it all. It felt as if life – the life she now knew and wanted – had just dropped away from her, and she was left stranded and alone in a barren place where the colour had seeped out of everything. Only now it truly came home to her. This was it: the war was over, her time in the army was finished and it no longer wanted her. For a moment she stopped, dizzy at the thought. She was back here. Birmingham: where she had begun. In those seconds she felt as bad as at any time she could remember. It felt as if her life was finished.

The ride on the trolleybus did nothing to cheer her. It was still an overcast day, neither raining nor sunny. Everything looked smaller, meaner and more run-down than she remembered. The streets appeared narrower and the bomb scars still looked raw and a mess. She looked out of the murky window, catching glimpses of children playing on the bombsites, of underfed people who looked washed out and harassed after all the months of shortages and worry. Everything looked drab. She was so caught up in looking out at it all that she almost missed her stop and had to push through to get out, causing people to mutter in annoyance.

As if in a dream, she walked along to Kenilworth Street, memories flooding back of the neighbours: Jenny and Stanley Button, who had been so kind to her and who had been killed in the bombing; the elderly twins who ran the sweet shop; Dot Wiggins, another kind neighbour who was now happily remarried to her Italian husband, Lou, in Duddesdon nearby; and of course the Browns, Em and the rest, the family she would have liked to have grown up in, instead of her blighted one. She hesitated at the entrance to one of the back yards where her family had lived for a time. The entry still looked the same, dark and dingy. And there was the ghost of her younger self sidling out onto the street, arms itching with eczema and impetigo, clothes smelly, trying to join in the street games with the other children, hoping and praying they’d let her have a go . . . All of it filled her now with a sense of rage, a furious sadness for her younger self.

I can’t come back and live here, she thought. I’ll go anywhere – but not here.

Pulling herself together, she stood up straight and went across to knock on the Browns’ door. It was Em who opened it, an older-looking but still sweet-faced Em, with her straight brown hair and freckled nose. She held the door back, bewildered at first, then gasped, beaming with pleasure.

‘
Molly!
Oh my word!’ She rushed to hug her. ‘Come on in – I knew you’d turn up one day. Took your flaming time, didn’t you?’

The Browns’ house looked exactly as Molly had always remembered it, and she found this both a comfort and a bit depressing at the same time. She had been here on and off throughout the war, whenever she could, but as she followed Em through to the back kitchen, saw the table and chairs, the stove, the same plates and pots on the shelves, and Em’s mom Cynthia sitting at the table with the family’s ration books in front of her, she found herself wondering how so little could have changed, when she had been so far and seen so much.

‘Guess who’s here, Mom!’ Em announced, though Cynthia was already looking up to greet her.

‘Hello, love!’ Cynthia cried, delighted. Molly went over and gave her a kiss. Cynthia had been like a mom to her. ‘You back for good now, are you?’

‘Well, the army’ve had enough of me,’ Molly joked.

‘Here, sit down – Em’ll bring you a cup of tea. Don’t you look well – it’s suited you, hasn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ Molly said, thinking this was an understatement indeed. She knew she looked more healthy and better fed than most of the civilians. She saw that Cynthia had aged a good deal since she’d last seen her, her skin looking tired and her once-dark brown hair a long way towards grey. But her dark eyes were still full of life.

‘Good job you came today,’ Em said. ‘I’m off work ’cause Robbie’s not well. He’s asleep at the moment. Mr Perry’s nice like that, if I need time off.’