The Photographer's Wife Read Free

good.”
    “She’s on the list now anyway,” the man says, waving his clipboard at her.
    “Well, you can bloody well take her off the list,” Minnie tells him. “Go stand by Glenda’s suitcase over there,” she instructs, prising Barbara’s hand from her own and pushing her across the platform away from the train. “And stop bloody crying!”
    Barbara forges her way though a sea of children moving in the other direction and places one hand on the suitcase as she watches the altercation between her mother and the man. She can’t hear what she is saying but there is something magnificent about her mother’s posture, hands on hips, giving him what-for. She feels proud.
    “Right,” Minnie says, once the man, with a shrug and a disparaging wave over his shoulder, has turned his attention elsewhere and she has crossed to join Barbara. She picks up the suitcase and heads for the exit.
    “Aren’t we being ‘vacuated, then?” Barbara asks.
    Minnie pauses and, uncharacteristically, crouches down in front of her daughter. “Do you want to be evacuated? Do you want to get on the bloody train and go to Wales? Because believe me girl, you’re one step away from it. Just say the word.”
    “No!” Barbara says, starting to cry again.
    “Then stop your sobbing girl! I’m taking you home.”
    “And Glenda?” Barbara asks, trying to look over her shoulder as they pass through the echoey madness of the station hall.
    “She’s twelve. She knows how to make her own way home,” Minnie says. “And she’ll find a nice hard slap waiting for her when she gets there. The little cow!”
    Unexpectedly, Minnie stops walking, so Barbara peers up at her. “Where’s your things?”
    Barbara looks at her empty hand and tries to remember when she lost track of the basket. “The man,” she says, pointing backwards. “He put it in the train.”
    “Jesus! That’s all we need,” Minnie says. “We won’t be getting that back now. A right bloody waste of time this has all been. And what am I supposed to dress you in now? Honestly! As if times aren’t hard enough! You had better behave, girl. You had better be so bloody good. I swear, you cry once, you’ll be on that train to Wales and it won’t be just for the war, it’ll be forever!”
    Barbara squeezes her eyes shut to prevent more tears, so close now, from leaking out, and she fails as a result to see an uneven paving stone. She trips and is yanked upright again.
    “Walk nicely!” Minnie says.
     
    ***
     
    Barbara sits alone, her legs crossed, on the single bed they have moved into the shelter. She is supposed to be reading but is instead studying the reflection of the candle in a newly formed puddle on the ground. She is listening for the first bombs to arrive. The air-raid siren was five minutes ago.
    The door to the shelter opens and Glenda appears. “It’s ‘orrible out there,” she says, starting to pull off her wet coat, hesitating, then finally removing it after all. “It’s horrible in here too. Where’s Mum, then?”
    “Gone to get soup,” Barbara says. “She said don’t move a muscle.”
    “Mapledene Road got hit,” Glenda announces.
    “Really?”
    “Fell in someone’s back yard. Blew all the windows out. And blew the shelter right out of the ground too. They wasn’t in it though.”
    Barbara blinks at her sister, then looks around at the corrugated iron walls and tries to imagine them being blown out of the ground .
    “Don’t worry,” Glenda says, sitting on the edge of the bed and removing her shoes. “Lightning never strikes twice.”
    “Here they come,” Barbara says, cocking one ear to the distant whistle of an incendiary bomb.
    Glenda nods, waits for the explosion – it’s a long way away – then crosses her legs and sits opposite her sister. “Oh sister,” she says, dramatically. “Whatever am I going to do now?”
    Barbara folds her book – a tattered copy of Little Black Sambo – and looks up at Glenda, her wrinkled