My Daughter, My Mother (15 page)

John and Patty stared with great curiosity as Sissons halted Rags. Margaret looked hungrily up at the back of the trap and saw inside what to her appeared like a little man whom she could barely recognize. Tommy jumped down in one athletic leap and stood in front of her. He was eight now, but he had always been big for his age and he had grown and filled out. He seemed huge to her, with his broad shoulders. His dark hair was also longer than she’d ever seen it and quite unruly, and he was swarthy from being outdoors.

‘’Ello, Sis,’ Tommy said.

‘’Ello, Tommy.’ She wanted to put her arms round him, but when she went to do so he shook her off.

‘None of that,’ he said with a swagger.

He was wearing a very large pair of trousers cut down for him and belted in at the waist, and a brown shirt that also looked too big, so that he had enormous rolls of sleeve up each arm. On his feet were a pair of muddy black boots, and there were smears of muck and mud all over his trousers. Margaret was in awe of him, and a bit frightened.

‘So, this is where you are.’ He looked at the house with a direct gaze. ‘Looks very nice.’

‘It is,’ Margaret said. ‘And this is John and Patty.’

Though they were older than him, Tommy looked them up and down with a slight air of disdain. Margaret could see that he considered himself a man now, and all of them children.

‘D’you want to have a look round?’ John asked. He had been pleased there was another boy coming.

‘All right,’ Tommy said as if he was doing them a favour. His voice sounded loud and rough compared with John’s.

They showed him round the orchard and garden, then the paddock. While they were walking down there, Margaret tried to keep close to Tommy. She wanted to be near him. ‘Have you seen our mom?’ she asked him.

Tommy turned in an irritated way. ‘How d’you think I’d’ve seen ’er? She ain’t gunna come out ’ere, is ’ er?’

They showed him round everywhere, though of all things Tommy seemed most at home in the paddock with the cows. The sisters had arranged a nice tea, and he sat at the table with them and certainly ate his fill. He talked about the farm where he was billeted, about milking cows, and about barns and hay and straw and chickens. He talked about his hosts, Mr and Mrs Wilkins. Once Margaret heard him refer to them as Mom and Dad. Inside, she could smell his clothes too.

To give Sissons time to get back, they had to leave straight after tea.

‘Bye then, Sis,’ Tommy said, climbing up on the trap.

‘Bye, Tommy. Will you write us a letter? I’ll write you?’

Tommy made a gesture with his hand, which she could see meant that he wouldn’t.

‘See yer,’ he said. ‘Glad you’re all right.’ And he sprung up onto the trap and sat with his knees agape. For a moment it felt unbearable that he was leaving, but then the feeling passed.

Margaret stood waving him off, with John and Patty, who were now far more like a brother and sister to her than her once-beloved Tommy. Now Tommy seemed like a stranger.

Eighteen

On 18th March 1944 the RAF dropped more than three thousand tons of bombs on the city of Hamburg.

In the scale of world disaster, compared with the devastation of this city or that, the grief of a little girl in a rural English village registers zero – below zero – as do the feelings of all children in wartime. But that same day, 18th March 1944, felt to Margaret like the end of her life.

She was nine years old by then – two months away from her tenth birthday. For more than six months now she had been the only child living in Orchard House. John’s and Patty’s parents, who had in any case visited them regularly, came to the conclusion that they would now be safe enough back in Sparkhill. They were missing their children too much to leave them in the country any longer – and there was always the option to come back.

‘You will come and see us, when you get back to Birmingham, won’t you, Margaret?’ Patty said before they left. She had grown into a tall, graceful fourteen-year-old. John had also shot up and become rather gangly.

Margaret missed them both terribly. But she was made much of in Orchard House by the sisters, one of whom missed her own sons, while the other had never achieved her hope of having children of her own. And by now Margaret was also attending the village school. She had made other friends, learned to talk like them, be one of them. She was a village girl now, with a country accent, living in a house with educated, gentle people. She was learning at school, completely used to the routine and the teachers. Until someone mentioned it and reminded her, Margaret had almost forgotten she was an evacuee and had forgotten about Tommy, who had never come to see her again. These days she never gave Birmingham a thought.

She felt secure and loved, and she had learned to love back. There were so many creatures to love: the sisters of course, and Patty and John. But there was also her constant, tail-wagging companion Dotty, and the cows (Mildred had died and been replaced by another called Beryl, and Poppy was still going strong) and Rags. And there were the hens, whose warm eggs she was used to going and collecting before breakfast, and a favourite lamb every year on the farm . . . And there were kindly Emily, and old Sissons, who let her help him around the garden and paddock, talking to her now and then through his pipe.

This was life, so far as she was concerned. It would just go on and on.

The sisters had not told her that they had received a note from Ted Winters, her father, that was so brusque and rude they hadn’t known how to reply or what to do.

That Saturday midday they were finishing off making bread, with Margaret and the sisters and Emily the maid all round the big kitchen table, which was dusted with flour. The room was cosy and the windows steamed up. Margaret was standing on a stool. They had taught her how to knead the dough, which she was doing as hard as she could.

‘That’s it, Margaret – a nice lot of air in it,’ Jenny Clairmont said. ‘We’ll soon have it in the oven.’

The knocking came at the back door. Margaret first saw a pair of scruffy boots on the step, and some faded black trousers. Above, a jacket swinging open, a stained green jersey and a rough, dark-eyed face, shadowy with stubble.

‘May I help you?’ Mrs Higgins asked. Margaret could hear that she was afraid of this stranger with his grim expression.

‘Ar – yer can. I’ve come to fetch my wench. A right rigmarole I’ve ’ad getting ’ere an’ all.’ He nodded towards Margaret. ‘That ’er then?’

Margaret’s hands were clogged with dough. She just stood there as it dried on, encasing her fingers. Jenny Clairmont wiped her own hands and went to join her sister by the door.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. As the taller of the two, she seemed to have more power in the situation. ‘I’m afraid we have no way of knowing who you are.’

‘I’m that wench’s father,’ Ted Winters said angrily. ‘And I’ve come to tek ’er back ’ome with me. That’s all yer need to know about me.’

‘Maggie?’ Jenny turned. ‘Is this – do you know this man?’

Margaret’s knees had gone weak. She shook her head. Dimly, very dimly she did remember him, but . . . But . . . Her head started to whirl inside. Her father? What did this mean?

‘Course she does,’ he said. ‘’Er always was a slow’un. Now, you pack up and come with me. You’re needed at home – sharpish. Got to get back to Birnigum today.’

Margaret managed one word, which came out as a whimper. ‘Mom?’

‘Yer mother passed on years back. Now get yerself together. Don’t keep me waiting.’

‘I’ll take her upstairs,’ Jenny Clairmont said. ‘Wash your hands, Maggie.’

She was in a state, Margaret could see. As soon as they were out of earshot Jenny took hold of her by the shoulders.

‘Is that really your father? Are you sure?’

Margaret nodded. It was as if three thousand tons had gone off in her head. It was hard even to breathe.

She thought Jenny Clairmont was going to weep. ‘We should so like you to have stayed here . . . But you’re his daughter. I can’t—’

Margaret sucked in a gulp of air. ‘I want to stay here with you. Don’t make me go!’

There was nothing much the sisters could do. The child’s father had come; they could hardly refuse to give her back to him. They hurried to give her everything they could: a holdall with her clothes and shoes, her teddy, sandwiches and fruit. They helped her put her coat on.

‘Goodbye, dear . . .’

‘Oh, goodbye . . .’

She kissed each of their soft cheeks, wet with tears, as were hers. She had a scream bigger than herself trapped inside.

‘Let us have your address before you go, Mr Winters,’ Mrs Higgins asked, ‘so that we can write to dear Maggie . . .’

‘Two, back of sixteen, Upper Ridley Street,’ Ted Winters called dismissively over his shoulder. Without another word of gratitude or civility for the women who had cared for his daughter all these years, he hustled Margaret out of the door, not caring that she was sobbing her heart out.

‘We’ve got a long walk ahead of us, so yer can pack in yer blarting,’ he said. ‘Give us that bag and let’s get on with it.’

The sisters had to shut Dotty in the house to stop her chasing after them. They came out to the road and stood waving and wiping their eyes as Margaret and her father began the eight-mile walk to Worcester, from where they would catch a train to Birmingham.

Margaret sat in her front room as the memories washed through her. It came to her as physical pain, the same aching sickness she had felt then, as this man who called himself her father tore her step by step away from everything she knew and loved.

She could see her feet as they had been then, in some brown, second-hand boots that she had been given once she had grown out of Tommy’s, her blue wool skirt and little macintosh. Her father’s feet marched ahead of her, his heels worn almost to nothing. She watched those heels with loathing. Everything about him was foreign to her. He was carrying the holdall, but after a while he said, ‘Bugger this, I ain’t carrying this all the way . . .’ He threw it over the gate into a field.

Margaret stalled. Everything of hers was in there: her little life, her treasures. ‘I want it,’ she said.

‘Why?’ he turned, sneering. ‘Is there summat we can sell in there?’

‘My things . . .’ She moved to go and fetch it, but he grabbed her by the arm.

‘Goo on – get moving, yer silly little bint.’

Now, all these years later, Margaret closed her eyes and let herself remember that day when her real self, her glowing little soul that had been nourished by her life in Buckley, had sputtered and died. Her face creased with the agony of it, of all that it had meant. And back then, as a nine-year-old, she had not known what was waiting for her in Birmingham, of those desolate years ahead. All she knew was this tearing away by a man whom she already hated with all a child’s hurt and passion.

Nineteen

Meena sat on a stool by the breakfast bar in the kitchen, a long cardigan over her nightclothes, cradling a mug of tea up close to her face. Its sweet, milky aroma filled her nostrils. Silently she watched her husband getting ready for work.

Khushwant was at the table with his back to her, munching toast and turning the pages of yesterday’s
Evening Mail
. His hair needed cutting, she saw. Once a raven-black, vigorously sprouting head of hair, it was greying now and encroaching down over the collar of his black jacket. The collar also showed up scattered specks of dandruff. He finished the last of his hot chocolate, belched softly and pushed his chair back. Closing the newspaper, he tapped it with his finger, twisting round to remark, ‘All this beating up of miners – sticks and truncheons! This country’s getting like India.’

Meena smiled faintly. Her husband was a good man, she knew that now. At forty-five years, he was prematurely stooped as if a weight was bearing down on him, and his joints were already arthritic: the fruits of years of hard work and worry, and his love of fatty foods. He was a big, lumbering man these days, with a heavy stomach on him.

‘You should become a
sannyasi
like the Hindus,’ she would tease him sometimes, patting his blancmange of a stomach as they lay in bed. ‘Go out begging for a handful of rice to fill your belly. Then you wouldn’t be so fat.’

Khushwant would chuckle.

‘Leave me alone, woman. I’m a prosperous businessman – what need have I to go begging? Anyway, how would it look if I was lean like a beggar? Everyone would think my business is failing.’

‘Too much butter,’ Meena would retort. Her own body stayed stubbornly wiry and thin. ‘So much fat – I could light you up, like a candle!’

Laughter and teasing. It had not always been like that. It had taken years for them to grow into each other. These modern women, she thought, they would have left long ago.

‘Is
she
going out today?’ His heavy features lifted towards the ceiling. Both knew he meant Roopinder. Neither of them had warmed to their daughter-in-law or found her easy.

‘To her mother’s.’

Khushwant rolled his eyes.

‘See you later.’ He picked up his lunch box, which she had prepared, stuffed with his favourite things: cheese sandwiches with lime pickle, onion
pakoras
, KitKats, bananas, and his flask of sweet, milky tea. She heard the front door close and the car starting up. Even now it astonished her that they had not just one car, but three. Roopinder had a little one to run the children about in, and Raj had just bought another to get to work. In the evening the tarmac at the front was crowded with them. Meena could remember when a bicycle had seemed an unaffordable luxury.

She was jolted out of her reminiscences by Raj. He nodded sullenly at her. His appearance immediately made her anxious and she spoke sharply.

‘You’ll be late. You need to hurry up.’

Raj poured himself a bowl of cornflakes, clicked on the radio and sat glued to it as he ate. He was sideways on to Meena and she studied him, assailed by the usual, almost unbearable tension of emotions that both her older two children now brought out in her.

The crisis in Amritsar had resulted in the army storming the Golden Temple, causing terrible damage. Among the dead, they discovered in the aftermath, was Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, the leader of the occupation, now being hailed by his followers as a hero and martyr. The Sikh uprising had been brutally crushed. Everyone was scandalized, grief-stricken, but Raj took it deeply personally. He had been full of grief and anger ever since.