All The Days of My Life Read Free

Mary’s thumb, as she heard Mannie’s walking run along the corridor of the moving train, moved up, slowly and steadily, from her lap into her mouth. She did not know what was going to happen. She felt very frightened. Mr Burns, sweating in his shiny black suit, his collar and tie, at the carriage door, might come in and make them all put out their hands and hit them with his long wooden ruler. He had broken a girl’s finger once, her brother Jackie had told her. Just as bad was the loss of her magic dream, like getting a toffee and having Ivy snatch it away, unwrap it and put it in her own mouth. Great big red lips, yellow teeth, pink tongue sucking round her toffee.
    â€œTake your thumb out of your mouth, Mary Waterhouse,” came the shouting voice. “You’re not a baby now.” She took it out.
    â€œAs for the rest of you guttersnipes – get this carriage cleaned up. Ugh – it smells. Didn’t your mothers give you a wash before you came?” And he disappeared.
    â€œIvy washed me,” Mary said into the rustling noise as the children collected newspapers from the floor. She was remembering the cloth, grey and part of an old shirt, which had gone wet and stale-smelling, round her neck and ears, before she set off for the school, where all the children, with paper bags or brown paper parcels containing their clothes, had mustered in the playground before leaving for the station. She remembered the way Ivy’s chest, on a level with her own head, moved in and out in sharp jerks. She panted as she wiped. “Don’t move your bloody head,” she had cried, as Mary turned away to avoid her breath. “Little madam,” she had muttered crossly, but Mary did not know exactly what she meant.
    â€œI don’t know what I’m supposed to do with all this lot,” said sharp-faced Cissie, standing up, clutching a heap of screwed up newspaper to her bony little chest. “Old Burns just thinks he’s better than what we are. Just because he’s a rotten schoolteacher. My mum says she remembers him coming to school with no boots on. She reckons he used to live down Wakefield Street and there were eight of them in the family. And they didn’t have no blankets in the winter time,” she concluded triumphantly and stood there, peaky and small, in the middle of the jolting carriage, wearing a grey woollen skirt too long for her and a skimpy, faded blouse with flowers on it. “Here, Peggy,” she said. “Chuck these out the window.”
    Peggy, who was still sitting down, stood up slowly and took the papers. The others watched her.
    At the window she said, “I might get into trouble.”
    Mary stood up and, standing on tiptoes, began to help her push the newspapers out. They were whisked off, down the side of the train. Peggy joined her at the window and laughed as the newspapers were half-torn from her grasp.
    â€œNow come and sit down and behave yourself, Peggy,” ordered Cissie, the oldest child of a large family. Peggy, the slow-witted child, father unknown, of slow-witted Marge Jones, who lived over the stable in Meakin Street where old Tom Totteridge kept his horse and cart, did as she was told. She said, “I want my mum.”
    â€œOh, my Gawd,” said Cissie.
    â€œCARELESS TALK COSTS LIVES,” Frank Jessop read, slowly and stonily, from the advertisement opposite him, above Mary’s head.
    The train went, for a long, dark time, through a tunnel. In the blackness, in the acrid stench of soot, Peggy began to cry. There was a thump in the corridor outside, and a cry of pain.
    â€œIt’s all dark,” said Mary, frightened.
    â€œIt’s a tunnel,” said Ian Brent. “I went through one before – on the way to the seaside.”
    â€œDoes it stop?” asked Cissie.
    â€œCourse it does. It’s a tunnel, ain’t it.” Nevertheless in the banging, snorting, pitch black carriage