Now the War Is Over Read Free Page B

misery. Reggie had
saved them! Mom didn’t seem interested in that. But she couldn’t stop thinking about Reggie and those blazing blue eyes of his. She thought Reggie was amazing.
    After that, Tommy refused to be taken out anywhere. He was content to go into the yard where everyone knew him. But if Rachel said she was going to take him out, his little body would start to
sway this way and that like a sapling in the wind and he’d get all worked up.
    ‘No!’ he would mouth, getting more and more panic-stricken. ‘Not going – no – stay here!’
    Melly could not rid herself of a heavy feeling of wrongdoing. It was all her fault – she had taken Tommy out and this had happened. She had been trying to do something good and it had all
gone wrong. She took it completely to heart. As Tommy’s big sister, she had always been the one to teach him and to look after him, ever since he was tiny. Mom relied on her – she
always had. Looking after Tommy, she had come to believe, was what she was
for.

Two
    ‘I saw this little lad with his arse hanging out of his trousers,’ Rachel would relate, a mischievous but fond twinkle in her eye. ‘You could hear him right
across the market, yelling his flaming head off, selling his comics. Some of them were so old they almost fell to bits in your hand! That was your dad – always up to something. I fell in love
with him there and then.’
    Melly knew that her mom and dad, Rachel and Danny, had fallen in love very young. They often told the story of how they had met on the Rag Market when Nanna Peggy, Rachel’s mother, had a
pitch there.
    Whenever Mom told this story, when they were sitting round having Sunday tea or some such, Auntie Gladys would shift a bit in her chair, pulling her shawl round her, making her face at Dad which
meant she was pretending to be hard done by and say, ‘That was before I was landed with him day in, day out, the cheeky little sod. Heaven knows what I did to deserve that.’
    A boyish grin would stretch across Dad’s face and he’d look from one to the other of them, tweak his cigarette from his mouth between the V of his fingers, blow out a lungful of
smoke and say, ‘Clapping eyes on me was the best day of both your lives, weren’t it?’
    Melly and her brothers had all grown up living with their mom, dad and auntie Gladys. Gladys, a widow, had lived in the yard for over twenty years. She was a strong, striking-looking woman in
her fifties with a blade-like nose and piercing blue eyes. She had worked on the city’s Rag Market for years as a ‘wardrobe dealer’ selling second-hand clothes. Although she could
tease him about it now, Danny had come to be in her care for very sad reasons. When Gladys’s sister, Danny’s mother, died, Danny’s father couldn’t – and didn’t
want to – cope with his four children. He delivered Danny and his sisters into separate orphanages. Gladys tried to find out where they were, but she never did know where they had gone and as
there was no love lost between her and Danny’s father, he wouldn’t tell her. It was only when Danny reached fourteen years of age and was able to work that he got out and came to find
Gladys, who took him in. Though he found two of his sisters later, they were never really a family again and they had made their own lives outside the city. Rachel and Danny had married young and
had lived with Gladys in her tiny, but spick-and-span, house ever since.
    Melly had never lived anywhere other than this yard, down an entry off Alma Street in Aston. She heard people talking about what a state the place was in, thanks to Hitler and
his bombs. But she was born just as the worst of the blitz on Birmingham began. She could not remember it any other way than it was now.
    Hitler had certainly done his part and the district was pocked with damage, bomb pecks and water-filled craters, gaps along the rows of houses and factories, still full of rubble and now strewn
with weeds.