All The Days of My Life Read Free Page A

he was uncertain. “Here! What’s that?” he cried in alarm as the thumping started again in the corridor.
    â€œIt’s me,” came a voice, Mannie’s. “I’m trying to get in. I can’t find the door. Why’s it gone all dark? Is it an air raid?”
    â€œNo,” said Ian. “Here – I’ll stick my hand out the door. See if you can grab hold of it.”
    They were blinded by sudden light. Ian Brent was there with his hand out. Cissie licked her lips. Mannie stood there in the carriage door, uncertain of his reception.
    It was Peggy who half shouted, “Wetpants. Wetpants. Mannie is a wetpants,” but the others, whose fears had all been increased by the sudden and unexpected darkness, ignored her. They were in no mood, now, to turn on each other.
    Win Hodges, who had been up the best part of the night, doing her own and her brother’s washing, slept on in the corner, pale as a cellar mushroom.
    â€œWhen will we be there?” Cissie asked Ian Brent. An only child, with a father who worked for the Gas Board and a mother sewing part-time in a bakery, he had been away on trains twice before.
    â€œSearch me,” he said. “Must be getting on for teatime now.”
    Mary, still blinking a little, went back to looking out of the window. The train drew them through a big pinewood. The great eye of the sun hovered over the points of the trees. Looking down deep into the darkness of the branches, Mary remembered, again, her one book and the picture of the two children holding hands amid the long, dark trunks of the trees, at night.
    â€œOh – it’s about two kids, whose Mum and Dad couldn’t feed them no more, so they took them out in the woods and lost them on purpose like so they couldn’t find their own way home,” Ivy had told her negligently. As she remembered that, Mary’s mouth opened. The trees, their tops gleaming with sunshine, which had so charmed her, now made her feel scared. Her eyes filled and brimmed over. Tears began to roll down her chubby cheeks.
    â€œWhat’s up, Mary?” said Frank Jessop.
    Mary, remembering more of Ivy’s words, “– then they come to a witch’s house and she tried to eat them up –” and seeing Ivy’s blonde hair streaming down from under a steeple-crowned hat, gave a deep, gasping sob, like a howl.
    â€œCheer up, Mary. It’ll be all right,” said Frank. “It’s fer yer own good. You can ’ave an egg every day. You can go home when we’ve beat the Germans.”
    This did not comfort Mary, who felt she did not want to go home. There, on the one side, was the picture, just like a photograph, of Sid and Ivy standing outside the narrow brick house in Meakin Street, and on the other the picture in the book, showing herself and her brother Jackie abandoned and wandering in the dark forest at night. Lost between the two visions, she went on crying. Gradually, under cover of the sobs, her natural optimism asserted itself. Jackie would always look after her. He always did. Nothing bad ever happened to Jackie. The forest must have an edge. They could walk out of it, away, into the fields beyond. And, just then, the trees gave way to an expanse of fern-covered common land, vast, green, fenceless, hedgeless, intersected by small trodden pathways through the high ferns and gorse, all warmed and lit by the golden light of afternoon, as far as the pastureland, which rose in gentle hills on the horizon. And Mary,rubbing her two grubby hands over her wet cheeks, wiping her nose on her bare arm, ceased to sob.
    â€œWhen we’ve beat the Germans –” Frank had said. The children’s voices muttered on in the hot carriage. They were tired now.
    â€œDunno when that will be.”
    â€œMy dad,” Jim Hodges said stolidly, “reckons we’ll lose.”
    â€œWhat?” Mannie Frankel said, looking frightened: “Why?