The Photographer's Wife Read Free Page A

brow somehow exaggerated by the candlelight. “What’s happened, sister?” she asks.
    “Johnny's being evacuated tomorrow. They got hit three doors down and his Mum says it’s just too dangerous to stay.”
    Barbara nods seriously. Johnny is Glenda’s boyfriend and though she has never seen him, though, even now, she doubts his existence, she has heard all about him. “Is he going to Wales?”
    Glenda shakes her head. “Not everyone goes to Wales, silly.”
    “I knew that,” Barbara lies. “I just wondered.”
    “Oh, it’s the worst thing in the world when they leave you,” Glenda says. “I just want to die.”
    “Oh sister!” Barbara says, opening her arms and hugging Glenda awkwardly.
    “He was the only thing that held me together,” Glenda says, a phrase that she overheard her weepy teacher, Mrs Richardson, say that morning.
    “Don’t cry,” Barbara says, rather enjoying her role as confidante in this melodrama.
    “I can’t help it,” Glenda says, leaning back just far enough for Barbara to see that she has managed to produce a real, single tear. The ability to form tears on demand is a gift that Glenda has and this is perhaps one of the reasons why Minnie has so little truck with them.
    “You mustn’t cry,” Barbara tells her. “If Mum catches you, you’ll be sent to Wales.”
    “Maybe I should cry,” Glenda says. “At least that way I’d see Johnny again.”
    “But Johnny isn’t in Wales,” Barbara says, confused now.
    Another bomb whistles outside, closely followed by a far-off explosion and then, without warning, there is a stunning, earth-jolting sonic boom that shakes the bed from side to side, makes the flame of the candle flicker, even makes the ground ripple. Afterwards, everything is deathly silent, and it is only after thirty seconds or so when their hearing starts to return that the girls realise that this is not silence because the world has ceased to exist but a silence born of the fact that they have been momentarily deafened.
    The girls remain immobile, cross legged and facing each other, until Glenda – looking genuinely panicked – swings her legs over the edge and starts to pull on her shoes.
    “Where are you going?” Barbara asks. “Mum said...”
    “Mum said, Mum said...” Glenda repeats.
    “She said to stay put. She said you mustn't.”
    “It’s Mum I’m going to check on,” Glenda says. “What if she got hit?”
    Barbara bites her bottom lip. She doesn’t know what to do. She doesn’t know what to say.
    When the door to the shelter jerks open and Minnie appears, Barbara releases the breath she has been holding. “Did you hear that?” Minnie says, blustering into the shelter. “I almost spilt the soup. I swear the blast messed up me bleedin’ hair.”
    She puts the pan of soup down on a small stool, then turns and closes the door behind her. “You girls bein’ brave?” she asks, and Barbara turns away just long enough to wipe a tear – a genuine tear of relief – from her cheek. “Yes,” she says. “We’re absolutely fine, aren’t we Sis’?”
     
    ***
     
    The fear is so pervasive, so constant, that it begins to seem normal. But being scared, even all the time, is still being scared, and Barbara wishes she could be harder, like her mother, or even better, like her sister – apparently immune, apparently still thrilled by every bang, still excited by every near-miss.
    But the danger is undeniable, the signs are all around them now. The house at the end of the street is gone, the family within all dead; the gasometer around the corner is in flames. Barbara’s days at school are spent listening for distant air-raid sirens, which sometimes, if she concentrates, she can hear before anyone else. Sometimes she can hear them whole minutes before the local siren prompts their descent into the cellar where, despite the games and rhymes and distractions the teachers attempt to organise, Barbara listens, still, for clues from above. She’s