S
PRING
T
ERM
1936
One
‘Miss Purdy!’
Knuckles rapped hard on the door. ‘I don’t seem to see you downstairs. I did say breakfast would be at seven forty-five sharp!’
Gwen sat up, heart pounding. Where on earth was she? She took in the dressing table next to her bed, the colourless light filtering in between the curtains. Heavens, the new job! Birmingham! And that voice was her chain-smoking landlady’s. She was out of bed and peeling off her nightdress all in one move.
‘Coming! I’m coming, really I am!’
‘Mr Purvis and I are waiting,’ the voice complained. ‘And your kipper’s spoiling.’
Mrs Black’s tread departed mincingly – Gwen knew it was mincingly because it was the only way she could walk in those heels.
Gwen pulled her clothes on: brassière, camisole – a squeeze to pull it over her generous breasts – stockings, cursing as a splinter from the bare boards snagged into the ball of her foot. Normally she liked dressing: she enjoyed bright colours, hair ribbons, scarves, but there was no time now. Washing herself would have to wait too.
‘Oh, damn you, you wretched things!’ She pulled savagely at her suspenders with trembling fingers. How could she have overslept when she’d spent the night wide-eyed as an owl, staring at those limp curtains which didn’t quite meet in the middle? The last thing she could remember was hearing a tram rumble past outside and dimly, as she faded into sleep, a rising groan of sound which Mrs Black had told her she’d have to get used to when several went off at once the afternoon before. They were the factory ‘bulls’, the sirens indicating the beginning or end of a shift. She must have fallen into a deep sleep only minutes before it was time to get up. What a dreadful start to her first day!
She pushed her feet into her shoes without unfastening the straps, hastily coiled her thick hair up at the back, skewering it into place with a hairslide and tore out of her room along the brown lino of the landing and down the sludge-coloured runner of stair carpet. Dear God, this house was awful! But it was an adventure, she told herself, and adventure was what she needed.
‘Do I hear you coming, Miss Purdy?’ Mrs Black’s plaintive voice came to her. ‘Your kipper’s almost on its last legs.’
Meals, Mrs Black had informed her the evening before, were to be taken in the back room, a fussy place crammed full of pictures and ornaments. A row of dolls with china heads and big sad eyes sat along the dresser. They had sat together, a most meagre fire struggling for life in the grate, for a meal of Welsh rarebit edged with crinkly slices of pickled beetroot, topped off with cherry Madeira cake and a cup of tea. Gwen’s fellow lodger, a Mr Harold Purvis, had only arrived two days earlier himself, to take up work in the accounts department of a local machine-tool firm.
‘So nice,’ their landlady had said fawningly as she introduced them, ‘to begin the new year with new faces in the house.’ She gave a sigh. ‘I’m reduced to lodgers since I lost my George.’
Mr Purvis blushed and murmured a greeting. He was well into his thirties, with a doleful face and a bald pate, around which clung a ring of black, neatly trimmed and rather oily hair.
The Welsh rarebit had had a strangely lumpy consistency which made Gwen grateful for the sharp vinegar in the beetroot.
‘It’s hard to go wrong with pickles, isn’t it?’ Mr Purvis remarked gloomily. He was evidently cursed with adenoids.
Gwen smiled and agreed, thinking:
Oh my goodness, are we going to have to sit here making polite conversation every night?
They had asked one another a few questions – yes, he was new to the area, had moved across from Oldbury. Oh, she was a teacher, was she? That was nice. From Worcester? Gracious. Bit different here, eh?
Mrs Black’s voice sounded as if she gargled with tin tacks. All the time they were eating, she raided her packet of Player’s for one cigarette after another and the air had a blue tinge. She kept calling Mr Purvis ‘Harold’.
‘Harold is a musical man, he tells me,’ she informed Gwen. ‘He plays the trumpet. I hope you don’t mind me calling you Harold?’ She told them her own name was Ariadne.
‘I like people to know.’ She held a little piece of cherry Madeira between her stubby finger and thumb, little finger crooked. ‘The name Black is so very ordinary, isn’t it? I like to feel my Christian name is something rather
out of the way
.’
‘It’s certainly that,’ Gwen agreed.
‘Latin, isn’t it?’ Mr Purvis ventured, wiping his chin. ‘Wasn’t she the er . . . lady with the hair made of snakes?’
‘Oh, aren’t you
clever
?’ Mrs Black cried, leaning towards him.
Gwen, from reading books of myths to schoolchildren, knew perfectly well that Ariadne was the one who helped Theseus escape from the Minotaur in the Cretan labyrinth using a ball of string, but this didn’t seem the moment to mention the fact. She eyed Ariadne Black, trying to decide how old she was. Anywhere, she decided, between forty-five and sixty. Mrs Black favoured floaty, diaphanous clothes and wore her hair shingled and shaded a gingery blonde that could only come out of a bottle. She looked, Gwen decided, as if she’d just stepped off the stage of a variety performance. And her affected Brummy accent made Gwen want to giggle.
This morning, as Gwen dashed in, mouthing apologies, she found Mrs Black standing behind Mr Purvis’s chair, slightly to the side of it, one hand resting on the back almost as if she was expecting someone to come and paint a portrait of the pair of them. Her eyebrows were brown lines pencilled in at an enquiring angle and even this early in the morning she had applied a fulsome coating of scarlet lipstick.
‘Oh!’ she cried. ‘At last! Mr Purvis has been
ever
so patient, haven’t you?’ She leaned down and patted his arm before taking her seat.
Harold Purvis said, ‘Good morning,’ and stared so hard at Gwen’s chest that she felt compelled to glance down and check whether the buttons of her dress had come undone. She hurried to her seat, bracing herself for the food.
They sat in morning light strained through net curtains. The one window faced over the side alley, but Mrs Black still kept it well shrouded. There was no fire in the grate and the room was cold. On plates in front of them, the kippers lay like a pair of moccasins left too long in the sun. Ariadne Black seemed to be breakfasting on cigarettes and tea. Beside her plate lay a copy of the
Birmingham Gazette
.
‘I hope you won’t mind.’ She pursed her lips coyly at them both. ‘Mr Purvis already knows I like to have my little read of the paper at breakfast time.’
‘Not at all,’ Gwen said, picking up her knife and fork.
‘You do
like
kipper?’ Ariadne Black leaned towards her and Gwen saw swirls of powder across her cheeks.
‘Oh yes, thank you,’ she lied, wondering how, this morning of all mornings, she was ever going to swallow it down.
In the homes around Canal Street School, the children were getting ready for the first day of term after the Christmas holidays.
Two boys burst out from the front door of a shop, setting the bell clanging madly. Parks’s Sweet Shop was situated almost under the railway bridge, so on sunny mornings the colourful array of goodies in the windows blazed in the light, but by the afternoon it was so dark and shaded it was, as Mrs Parks often remarked, ‘like living buried in a plot in the bleeding cemetery’. This morning, as it was the first day back at school, she followed her two youngest offspring to the door, pulling her cardi round her in the freezing morning. The two lads were off along the street, hands going to their mouths pretending they were smoking and puffing out warm breath to condense in white clouds in front of them.
‘’Ere, Ron, Billy!’ she called after them. ‘You come back ’ere dinner time. I don’t want you going down the cut!’
‘Awright, Mom!’ Ron, the younger of the two, shouted back.
‘And go straight to school – it looks like rain!’
They waved in a token fashion.
Not listening to a flaming word as usual. Mrs Parks sighed, watching them with fierce pride. Her lads, bless ’em! Those jerseys she’d knitted them for Christmas had come out a treat. Just right for this weather. She lit a Woodbine and stood, half in, half out of the door, enjoying the warm smoke in her lungs. Cold enough to freeze your entrails out there. She blew a mouthful of smoke out of the door and turned to her husband.
‘Reckon I’ll have some of them down today, Bert. Give ’em a bit of a spring clean.’ She felt wide awake and suddenly enthusiastic about washing the jars of bonbons and cough candy, the bowl of warm, soapy water.
One child, a girl of eight with long blonde plaits, came along from her house in Franklin Street with a slow, dreamy-looking gait. Clasped tightly in her hand was the halfpenny her mother had scrimped to give her for her milk. She was terrified she would drop it and it would roll off down the drain. Mummy would know somehow if she did, she was sure!
‘We can’t afford it,’ her mother had said, the tears coming again. ‘God knows – a halfpenny a day! But I’m not having anyone knowing. Don’t you go losing it, Alice. And don’t say a word to anyone . . .’
With her other hand Alice teased and rubbed at her hair, trying to make it look more untidy. She pushed one of her socks down a bit and tried to walk with a slouch. That was the trouble at the last school. Mummy just didn’t understand. It was all right looking neat as a pin when they lived in Solihull. In that other life when they weren’t poor. Everything was different now.
‘Alice, Alice, lives in a palace!’ The girls at Foundry Road School had circled round in the playground, chanting. A palace! If only they knew!
She’d begged to leave and start again at a new school. If it could only be different this time! Would she be able to fit in? Just to be invisible – that was her dream. She left home early so as not to meet too many other children in the street. As she drew nearer the gates of Canal Street School, the butterflies in her stomach got worse. She swallowed hard. She mustn’t be sick – she just mustn’t! In front of her she could make out the blurry mass of the school building. Squinting, she found her way to the gate. Alice didn’t know that not everyone saw the world in this soft-focused way, with people looming up close to her alarmingly, as if she was underwater. All she knew was that it was frightening.
‘Please,’ she prayed, even more nervous when she could see the blur of other children moving in the distance. ‘Please let it be all right this time.’
‘You’re going to school, Joey, so shut your gob.’
His mother was almost too breathless to speak, but there was no mistaking the iron in her tone. Joey swelled inside. If he felt anything these days, it was always anger, blasting up inside him.
‘I ain’t – I ain’t going! You can’t make me!’
‘I said shurrup! You’re going – d’you hear me?’ Her voice rasped at him. ‘And for fuck’s sake do summat to shut ’
im
up an’ all or I swear to God I’ll finish ’im!’ The sentence ended with a long bout of coughing.
The babby, two-year-old Kenny, was crying, nose plugged with green snot. Joey looked at him in disgust, then pushed a scrap of stale bread at him.
‘Shurrup, Kenny, will you?’ he roared. Then seeing the futility of this, softened his voice. ‘Come on – eat the bread, Kenny. Oh, pwor! Mom – he’s shat on the chair!’
‘Well, clean it up then! No good blarting to me about it.’
Joey carried the chair to the tap in the yard. He turned the tap on, waiting for the icy trickle to sweep the excrement off the seat. It wouldn’t budge. He picked up a soggy cigarette packet and poked at it, scowling furiously.
His sisters Lena, six, and Polly, four, chewed their scraps of bread like frightened rabbits. What use were they? Joey looked at them in fury as he put the chair down with a crash which made his mother curse. He’d have to wipe Kenny’s arse now. It was he who had to do everything, take it all on. He was the man of the house. Inside it was so cold they could see their breath on the air and there was no food – yet here she was trying to push him off to school like a fucking babby!
‘Send Lena to school. I ain’t going.’
‘Joseph – I’ve told you, today you’re going to that effing school if I have to carry you myself.’ The look on his mother’s face then frightened him. She frightened him when she yelled and carried on, but even more he hated her crying and now there were tears in her eyes. Joey felt like crying himself, but he forced the feeling down inside him and crammed his piece of bread into his mouth. It had blue spots on it and was hard work to chew. He tried not to look at his mother, struggling for breath by the dead ashes of the fire. The sight of her gaunt, sick face frightened him too much for him to let himself think about it. Two red patches burned on her cheeks. Her belly stuck out like a growth from her stick body. She stayed most of her day on the bed now. Since his Dad left everything was getting worse, all hope running out of him like water down a drain. He had to fight to stop it with every ounce of his strength.
‘The bread’s all mouldy, Mom,’ Lena whined.
‘Shurrup, will you!’ Joey yelled at her. ‘Just get it down you!’
‘Sssh, Joey,’ their mother protested faintly. A sob came from her, which made her cough until she retched.
‘You gunna be better soon, Mom?’ Polly said, frightened.