Tara Read online

  'You don't really think I'd leave my two best girls for long?' He looked down at her and smiled.

  An icy chill ran down her spine, not because she didn't believe him, but because for the first time ever she saw fear in his face. She turned to her mother and caught her wiping away a tear.

  Her parents were a handsome couple, Amy had heard that said since she was tiny. Arthur's blond hair, twinkling blue eyes and peachy skin suggested a boyish innocence, but the thin scar from his ear to his jaw, broad shoulders and rippling muscles spoke of an underlying toughness. Mabel, with her fiery colouring, hour-glass figure and beautiful face, demanded a second look. If there were ballots in Whitechapel for the most envied couple, the Randalls would have won.

  Amy pressed her face into the rough serge of her father's uniform and drank in that smell of Blanko, cigarettes and Lifebuoy soap that was peculiar to him.

  'Princess!' His hands gripped her sides, lifting her up into a fierce hug. 'You look after your mother for me and just be a good girl.'

  She couldn't remember the train pulling out, just the image of her parents' last embrace.

  'Mum! You were going to tell us about Grandma!'

  Tara's voice brought Amy back to the present.

  'Sorry, I was remembering seeing Dad off at the station. That was in '39 and it was only a few days after that I was evacuated to Kent with the rest of my school.'

  Paul's eyes went very wide. 'Was that scary?'

  'A bit.' Amy smiled at Tara's wide-eyed look of horror. 'But I wasn't there more than a month. No bombs dropped or anything so most of us went back home. Mother was worried because Dad was off in France somewhere, but she spent that winter painting greetings cards and talking about how when Dad came home we'd move out of London for good. In May, Holland and Belgium were invaded. I remember her sitting on the arm of an armchair in the parlour, her ear practically stuck to the radio listening for news, but she got a letter from Dad soon after.'

  Paul yawned, snuggling down on Amy's lap, his eyes drooping.

  'Into bed with you, my boy.' Amy stood up, lifting him in her arms, and tucked him in beside his sister.

  'Don't stop, Mum,' Tara implored her. 'Tell me about when the telegram came.'

  'It was a beautiful, hot summer's day in June,' Amy said thoughtfully, sitting back down on the bed. 'I was sitting on the floor in the parlour reading a Dorite Fairly Bruce school story. Mother was in the kitchen making a rhubarb pie.'

  The little parlour was so clear in her mind she could even smell wax polish. The sun had rarely penetrated into Durwood Street-aside from it being very narrow, opposite was a big old warehouse – but that day the rays had caught the top of the window at an angle and filtered through the lace curtains, making a pattern on the round supper table. The front door was propped open with a flat iron to let in the breeze and Mother was singing 'Barbara Allen' as she rolled out the pastry.

  They had been listening to the news of the evacuation of Dunkirk on the radio for what seemed like days and her mother had been on tenterhooks, waiting for news of Arthur. But only an hour or two earlier she had been her old optimistic self.

  'He must be all right, I'd have heard if he was hurt by now,' Amy had heard her say to Mrs Penny over the yard wall. 'Bet you he walks in here the moment I put my hair in curlers!'

  Amy could afford to be smug about her mother. Not for her the common headscarf or the crossover pinny. Mabel's lustrous hair tumbled on to her shoulders, her clothes, although just as cheap as anyone else's, had a certain flair. But it wasn't just that she was prettier and more lady-like than any other woman, more that she had the knack of getting what she wanted with seemingly no effort. While other mothers worked in munitions factories, Mabel painted greetings cards. Some women queued for hours to get meat; Mabel had only to smile and the butcher pressed a parcel into her hands.

  There were often fights in the street between women, but Mabel learned to sidestep them. She had a smile for everyone, a cheery greeting, yet she kept her distance, never allowing people to become over familiar.

  Amy never knew back in those days that they lived in what was termed a slum dwelling. She'd never been to a house with an inside lavatory or a bathroom. In Whitechapel terms there were much worse places than where they lived. In Cable Street and Limehouse there were reports of babies being bitten by rats and two families living in one room.

  'Time changes most things.' Amy patted Tara's cheek. 'You look back and find the details have gone fuzzy; you can't remember exactly who said what, or even in what order things happened. Yet I can see the moments just before the telegram boy arrived at our house as if it were just yesterday.'

  Paul was fighting sleep and losing the battle. His eyelids drooped, then he would force them open, only for them to close again.

  'I can pinpoint the very moment my cosy little world caved in,' Amy mused. 'I was sitting in our hall watching the dust flying around in a shaft of sunlight, because I liked to pretend it was fairies. Then suddenly there was this black shadow. It could have been a neighbour, the rent man or anyone, but I knew it was something nasty.'

  'What did Granny Mabel do?' Tara asked.

  'She stopped singing. She was out of the kitchen and up to the front door before I even got up off the floor. She just stood there with the telegram in her hand. I even remember her dress, it was green, with little pin-tucks down the bodice.'

  Amy couldn't tell Tara the full story. Even twenty years later, after enduring countless other harrowing scenes, the way her mother had gone to pieces that day still frightened her. Mabel had stood in the hall, bent over slightly as if she had a stitch, one hand on her stomach, the other supporting herself against the wall. All colour had gone from her face, she bit her lower lip so hard Amy saw spots of blood.

  Looking back, Amy knew her mother's spirit had left her body along with the last note of 'Barbara Allen'. Whatever was left behind didn't recognise her daughter, didn't seem either to hear or see.

  She had shaken off Amy's hand, stumbled into the parlour and sunk to her knees by the couch. Her daughter could only stare in horror as Mabel began to beat the seat with her fists. Dust had flown round the room, mingling with the screams of anguish.

  'I didn't know what to do.' Amy shrugged her shoulders as she told Tara the censored version of the story. 'I ran in to Mrs Penny next door and got her to help.'

  In fact there has been no need to run for help. Half the street had seen the telegram boy and by the time Amy reached the door they were already converging on number ten, faces wreathed in sympathy and understanding. There must have been twenty women, crossover print pinnies over the shabby dresses they wore day in, day out; headscarves over their heads knotted at the front turban-style.

  'Is it your dad?' Mrs Penny had shuffled towards Amy, leaning on her walking stick.

  'Mummy's gone all funny,' was all she could get out, but the agonised screams from behind her made her clamp her hands over her ears. 'Make her stop, Mrs Penny, I can't bear it.'

  'Did she go funny then, straight away?' Tara's eyes were shrewd and calculating; she guessed that her mother was leaving a great deal out.

  'She was very, very upset,' Amy said gently. 'I stayed with neighbours because I was just a little girl, remember, I didn't really know what was happening to Mother. By the time I went back home again she was just sad, staying in bed all day, not wanting to eat or take care of herself. But you must go off to sleep now, this isn't a nice story for bed-time.'

  Amy went straight to her room after tucking the children in. She sank on to the bed and struggled mentally to seal the old wound that she had unwittingly opened.

  She was lost in a seething mass of women – one little girl in a blue smocked dress, unseen by those who elbowed their way in to offer sympathy. Tongue-clucking, tea-drinking, cigarette-smoking harpies who smelled of sweat and cheap scent. They spoke of distant relations who had died unexpectedly, women taken in childbirth and even people knocked down by trams, yet not one of them not
iced that Mabel was withdrawing further and further into a corner, blank silence taking the place of her wild screaming.

  Someone put the rhubarb pie Mother had been making into the oven, but it was forgotten in the confusion until a smell of burning filled the tiny house. They seemed to forget, too, that Amy was sitting on the stairs as they launched into graphic suggestions of how her father might have been killed at Dunkirk.

  'A lot of them were blown up by mines,' one woman said, a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth. 'I 'opes it weren't that with Arthur, he was so 'andsome.'

  'It said in the paper they was mown down as they raced for the boats,' another voice piped up. "They said it was like 'ell, blokes wiv legs blown off and stuff floating in the sea.'

  Amy didn't know then that her father was a hero, that he had manned a machine gun giving cover to the rest of his platoon while they escaped to the boats. It might have helped that day to know his death had saved hundreds of others, and that he had been killed by a single bullet, instantaneously. But all Amy knew that day was that her wonderful, warm daddy was never coming home again and in all probability parts of his body were scattered to the four winds.

  Someone took her down to the Muckles at number twenty-four later that day. No-one asked if she wanted to go, or explained why they thought she should. In fact it brought it home to Amy just how bad things were, because her mother always sniffed at the Muckles. Amy assumed this was because the youngest children often had bare feet and lice; certainly their house was very dirty and overcrowded.

  She was given some bread and dripping and put to bed between Doris and Sadie Muckle, two teenage girls who smelled fishy. Johnny, Alf and Colin were on a mattress on the floor and across the tiny landing were the rest of the eight children with their parents.

  The next day Amy watched women trooping in and out of her house as she sat on the doorstep. The curtains were drawn and Amy thought her mother was dying, too, when she saw Doctor Graham arrive. Only by sitting quietly on the doorstep with her ears pricked for street gossip did she glean any information at all.

  'She's gone right off 'er rocker, poor lamb, tore up a picture of 'im saying he shouldn't never have joined up.'

  'She ripped her nightgown off and swore at the doctor when 'e tried to give 'er some medicine.'

  'Disgraceful behaviour, if you ask me. She ain't the first woman to lose her 'ubby, and she won't be the last 'afore this lot's over. She should pull 'erself together and remember she's got a kid.'

  The sound of pots and pans being thrown into the street alerted Amy a few days later. It was almost nine in the evening, as hot still as it had been at noon, the sun was like a huge orange, just about to slip down behind the clothing factory.

  China followed the pots and, between loud bangs as plates, cups and saucers shattered on the cobbles, Amy heard her mother screaming abuse.

  'Get out, you bitches,' she raved. 'Leave me alone, can't you? I want Arthur, not people who just want to nose through my things.'

  Mr Muckle was drinking some beer, sitting on the back step with his shirt off. He was very fat and his stomach oozed over his trousers. Mrs Muckle was changing the baby on the kitchen table and the rest of the younger children were tumbling around on the dirty kitchen floor wearing nothing more than their worn underclothes.

  ' 'Ark at that!' Mr Muckle looked round at his wife and smirked. 'Some people got no gratitude!'

  Amy darted out of the Muckles' front door just in time to see Mrs Hartley from number fourteen being forcibly ejected by her mother.

  'How dare you ask me for Arthur's clothes? I wouldn't let a man like yours within a mile of them.'

  Amy pushed through the crowd gathering to gawp and into her own house, seconds before the door slammed shut again.

  'You don't want me to go away too, do you?'

  Mabel turned and stared, almost as if she didn't know her, and in that second Amy understood why she'd been kept away.

  Her mother looked like a witch; hair tangled and wild, skin mud-coloured, eyes bloodshot and her nightgown covered in stains. Even from a distance of three or four feet she smelled bad.

  'You'd be better off without me,' was all Mabel said, and swept back up the stairs.

  'The Duchess' was a title soon dropped by the neighbours. Once it had signified Mabel's artistic talents, her good manners and manner of speaking. She had been the person they all asked for help with letters, on clothes, etiquette, education and even health. They had accepted her because she was married to Arthur and he had been one of their own.

  Arthur Randall had been the kind of man who made women's hearts beat a little faster. Blue eyes with a hint of mischief, a man tough enough to lay another out with a single blow, yet generous and sympathetic to anyone less fortunate than himself. He had been born in Whitechapel and, when his father was killed in the docks, his mother had become housekeeper to a doctor. Arthur may have had a good education, travelled to India before he met Mabel, but he had been one of the lads. Bad luck had brought him back to the dark streets of his childhood with his new wife, but he brought sunshine with him. Now he was dead, Mabel's accusations and tantrums were befouling the air and making lies of everything Arthur had believed in.

  'They called her "Mad Mabel" after that,' Amy whispered to herself.

  She wished she could forget how the tiny house had turned into the worst kind of hovel, her mother lying upstairs in filthy sheets while Amy was forced to forage for food.

  Those terrible nights of terror in the Blitz when she had huddled alone in the Morrison shelter watching the blackout curtains shredded by broken glass, as the warehouse across the street took a direct hit. She could still smell burning shrapnel in the back yard, see the night sky lit up like a horrific firework display and all the time the banging and thumping coming closer and closer.

  Could she possibly seek refuge now with a woman who had so totally neglected her nine-year-old child?

  It had been the evangelists who brought her mother back to a kind of reality some eighteen months later. But even though Mabel cooked and cleaned again, she never recovered her old personality. From then on it was scripture meetings, prayers and Bible readings and the humiliation of knowing everyone in Whitechapel laughed at Mabel and pitied her daughter.

  Yet sitting in her bedroom at George's now, reading the letter again, Amy found no mention of God's will, or even the Devil. Maybe going back to Somerset and seeing her own mother again had brought back the real Mabel Randall? Perhaps this was one last chance to reach out for one another?

  'I'm stronger now,' Amy whispered to herself. 'I can stand up to her. I don't have to let her push me around.'

  'Are you all right, Amy?' George's voice drifted up the staircase. 'Queenie's come round to see you.'

  'You took a long time seeing them off to bed tonight,' Harry said as Amy came down the stairs a few moments later. 'Or have you been admiring the new gnashers?'

  He was going out. He wore the pin-striped Italian suit he had worn the night he took her to hospital, and was drowning in Old Spice aftershave.

  'I was talking to the kids,' she said, watching him as he flicked a comb through already perfect hair. 'Going courting?'

  'No, boozing.' He grinned. 'My mate Needles got off in court today, we gotta celebrate.'

  A shaft of light caught the side of his face, showing up his angular cheekbones and giving him a slightly furtive look. Suddenly Amy's mind was made up.

  She halted in the doorway, looking at Queenie and George as they sat on the settee together looking at some old photographs. They looked like a couple – two outrageous characters, similar in age, size and mentality.

  Queenie's hair was like yellow candy floss, backcombed into a halo round her plump pink face. Dressed to go down the pub in a black Lurex frock, she oozed sensuality, warmth and good humour.

  'Hello, luv.' She looked up and smiled, blue eyes almost disappearing in a coating of vivid green eyeshadow. 'Blimey, you look the cat's whiskers!'

>   George struggled to get up to pour her a drink, but Amy pushed him back into the seat.

  'Stay where you are,' she ordered. 'I'll get us all a drink, we've got something to celebrate.'

  'You've decided to stay?' George's red face broke into a grin.

  Amy poured three glasses of whisky.

  'No, I'm going.' She smiled as she handed them the drinks. 'It's the best thing for everyone, George. I think you know that really.'

  She saw conflicting emotions flicker across his face. Relief that she and the children would be safe, but sadness too.

  'I'll miss you all,' he whispered.

  'We'll miss you, too.' She sat down on a chair opposite him. She wanted to hold his hand, stroke that big, kind face and tell him he was a man in a million, but not with Queenie there. 'We'll keep in touch, and there'll be holidays.'

  'You're doing the right thing, love,' Queenie said, her loud voice soft because she too had known Amy and the children their whole lives. 'It ain't as if it's forever, neither, get the kids through school in all that good clean air and maybe you can all come back one day.'

  Amy could see George was struggling to find the right words.

  'Don't be sad.' She smiled, hiding her own feelings. 'Just think of us all on a farm, George, and the satisfaction Mum will have at being proved right about Bill!'

  'If it don't work out,' he said slowly, filling his chest up with air, 'if she treats you mean or anything, I'll come and get yer.'

  'Well, 'ere's to a new beginning.' Queenie held up her glass. 'I reckon's you'll be all right down there meself.'

  'You must look after George for me.' Amy raised her glass to theirs. 'Here's to a new future for all of us!'

  Chapter 5

  'Well, this is the right village.' Harry stopped his car at the crossroads. 'Now we've only got to find the farm!'

  It was a straight choice: on up the main street, or turn left. Tara and Paul moved forward on the back seat, chins almost on Harry's and Amy's shoulders to see better.