The Photographer's Wife (2 page)

A train behind them hoots and puffs and starts, groaningly, to pull out of the station, and Barbara watches the slideshow of passing faces pressed at the grubby windows. Some of them seem happy and excited, while others are red-eyed and tear-stained. It’s confusing.

“I don’t have all day to discuss the pros and cons of government policy, Mrs Doyle,” the man is saying, waving his pen in the air with flourish. "So, it’s just this one, is it?” he asks, nodding at Barbara.

“No, it’s...” Minnie says, turning to where Glenda should be standing. “Where...?” she murmurs, reaching to pull Glenda’s suitcase closer before scanning the hordes around them. “Where did your sister go?” she asks, frowning heavily.

Barbara shrugs and stares at her feet.

“Did she go looking for the loo?” Minnie asks.

Barbara shakes her head.

“Mary mother of Jesus,” Minnie says, now grasping Barbara’s chin and forcing her to turn towards her. “Did she say something?”

Barbara nods vaguely.

“Mrs Doyle!” the man says.

“Just wait, won’t you?” Minnie tells him, then to Barbara, “What did she say? Tell me what she said.”

“It’s a secret,” Barbara whispers.

“What’s a bloody secret?” Minnie asks, and Barbara, who understands this tone of voice only too well, knows better than to obfuscate.

“She said she isn’t going to Wales. Not for anything, she said.”

“Mrs Doyle!” the man says, and Minnie scans the horizon once more before turning to face him.

“It seems you’re having trouble controlling your brood. Perhaps the Welsh will fare better! But in the meantime, there is this slight matter of these forms and what I should inscribe upon them. So just Barbara here, travelling alone is it?”

“I don’t know,” Minnie says. “Sorry, just... just hang on a mo.”

Minnie starts to push her way through the crowds, pausing to ask people, “Have you seen a little girl? Have you seen my girl? She’s got brown hair and a blue coat. About this tall. Have
you
seen her? Have
you
seen my girl?”

The people around her either ignore her – they’re just too busy – or frown at her as if she is mad. Even Barbara can see that expecting anyone to answer this particular question, today, in the middle of this mass of children, is indeed a kind of madness.

The man with the clipboard grabs Barbara’s hand and, initially, because it feels reassuring, she lets him do this. But when he starts trying to pull her towards a train carriage, she begins to struggle. “No!” she says, then, “Mum!” But Minnie isn’t looking. Minnie is lost in her nightmarish search for her other daughter, running towards girls who look a little like Glenda from behind and pulling them by their shoulders to face her.

“Mum!” Barbara shouts again, then, emulating the little girl she saw before, she says, “I won’t go. I won’t!” Seeing that this is having precisely zero effect, she begins to scream. Her piercing cry registers on some primeval level and Minnie stops in her tracks and turns to see her youngest, in mid-air, held at arms length, being passed by Grenville Wallace to a bald, greasy-looking man in a three-piece suit. She sees Barbara’s legs flailing and runs back through the crowd, knocking a little boy over as she does so; she offers a fumbling apology over her shoulder to the boy, now crying, but continues to run all the same.

Wallace attempts to block her path, saying, “Mrs Doyle! In God’s name! This is all most irreg–”

But Minnie pushes him aside, lurches past the bald man, and grabs her daughter’s hand just as she is being sucked into the darkness of the train – jerkingly, painfully yanking her back out onto the platform. “She ain’t bloody going to Wales on her own!” Minnie says, her voice incredulous. “She ain’t going without her sister! What are you thinking of?”

“If she doesn’t go today, then she won’t be going at all,” Mr Wallace says. “I’ll make bloody sure of that. Thousands, millions of children to evacuate and you think you can muck us around like this?”

“Don’t make me go,” Barbara sobs. “Please don’t make me go, Mum. I’ll be ever so good. I promise I’ll be 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 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 trying to detect a secret sign that might differentiate this bombardment from all of the others; she’s trying to detect some dark, non-audible vibration which might reveal that everything has changed, that Glenda and Mum have not, this time, escaped.

Once the air-raids are over, she walks home in the pitch black, past the vague shadows of bombed out buildings, past smoking, steaming remains, past shadowy figures who might be friends, only it’s too dark to see. Sometimes a blazing building provides light and she jumps over vast, snake-like fire hoses dragged by exhausted, blackened firemen. She tries not to notice the child’s toy poking from beneath a collapsed wall, tries not to worry about the origin of the red stain on the pavement. War provides no censorship, so Barbara tries to create her own. And now she must round the final corner – she holds her breath. Will the house still be there? Will it be in flames? Or will it be flattened?

She lets herself in and sits watching the door, waiting for Glenda and her mother to come separately through it, hoping that the siren won’t sound before they do so. And here they are, revealing that it has happened again: they have been spared – another daily miracle amidst the mayhem of bombed-out London. But today something is
different. Barbara can sense a change. Minnie is holding Glenda’s hand, and Glenda is as white as a sheet.

“Come on,” Minnie tells her. “Get your things. We’re going to the shelter tonight,” and Barbara doesn’t ask why; she doesn’t want to know what has happened, because she has learned that there is enough terror in each day for everyone and that sharing it around is superfluous, that sharing it around just adds to everybody’s burden. It’s one huge life-lesson that she will never forget.

Last night’s raids were local and lethal, and the youth club shelter, in the arched tunnel of the basement, is packed solid. There is sitting room but no more. Minnie tells Barbara to look after her big sister and starts to tiptoe to the far side to fetch soup from the WVS ladies. Everyone around them looks exhausted; no one slept much last night.

“Are you OK, sister?” Barbara asks, a little unnerved by Glenda’s silence. She hasn’t said a word yet.

Glenda nods and blinks slowly. “They were asleep,” she says quietly. “The whole family. It was an unexploded one from the night before, so they wasn’t even in the shelter. Not that it would have done ‘em any good. That was flattened too.”