War Babies (22 page)

Dolly stood leaning on the door frame. ‘One of my little buggers’s come home with nits!’ she complained. ‘I bet the whole lot of ’em ’ve got them now –
I’m going to have to see to them tonight. I bet it’s that Carter boy Reggie knocks about with. He gets everything, he does – impetigo, fleas, you name it . . .’

‘Cuppa tea?’ Gladys asked, stemming the flow of indignation.

‘All right, ta.’ Dolly sank down at the table, pulling her cigarettes out of her pocket. She giggled. ‘I’ll laugh if Mo’s got them an’ all. We’ll never
hear the end of it, ’spe-cially if it goes all round the factory!’

Gladys chuckled as well and Rachel felt relief seep through her. She hoped nothing more would be said about the disagreement.

‘I’ll get the boys to clean up that pram for you now the weather’s picking up, Rach,’ Dolly said. ‘It’s in the coal hole so it’s a filthy mess, but
it’s not had anything nasty in it. It’ll clean up nice. And I’m not planning on filling it again!’ She gave her chesty laugh.

Rachel smiled and nodded her thanks.

‘Now,’ Dolly said, coming over all motherly. She looked intently at Rachel. ‘How far on are you? About five months? When you’ve had it, you want to get yourself down to
the clinic – it ain’t far. I know some of ’em don’t hold with it but I went with the last two and they was good to me. They’ll find you a few bits and pieces for the
babby if you need it. And they’ll see everything’s all right . . .’

Rachel saw Gladys watching them.

‘Should I, Auntie?’ she asked, looking very humbly at Gladys. Both of them knew it was a way of apologizing for the words they had had earlier.

‘Dolly should know,’ Gladys said, still speaking rather tartly. She took a seat beside her friend and started pouring tea. ‘If she says go, you go.’ Rachel took this as
her cue to leave. The friends wanted to chat. But she also felt that she and Gladys had begun to make it up.

‘Danny – what the hell’re you doing?’

Rachel lay on their attic bed on a sweltering hot summer night as Danny pranced around the room.

As soon as they were married, they had taken up in the attic. The two of them shared Danny’s bed, a three-quarter-sized frame which was not too bad. Rachel had made the room as homely as
possible with some clippings from magazines – girls in pretty frocks and hats and a seaside view taken in Cornwall. ‘That’s for Jack and Patch,’ she had teased Danny as she
gummed it to the wall.

Going to bed and cuddling up with Danny was Rachel’s very favourite moment of the day, especially on those blessed nights when there was no raid.

‘You’re so nice and warm!’ she exclaimed, the first time they slept a whole night together. ‘It’s like sleeping next to the fire.’

But now a fire was the last thing she needed and Danny was jumping about like an excited flea.

‘Stop it!’ she hissed. ‘What’re you doing?’

She knew perfectly well what he was doing – he was boxing his own shadow, as if there was an opponent coming at him through the door.

Danny took another lunge, dancing light on his feet. Rachel watched him miserably. She was so hot and uncomfortable, her belly distended further than she could have believed was possible. Her
skin itched, her legs and back ached, and she was forever having to go and spend a penny.

‘Littl’un in there must be pressing down on you,’ Dolly told her. Whenever Dolly said something about the discomforts of carrying a child, it was always with a knowing
smile.

‘Oh – you should’ve seen me when I was carrying Fred,’ she would begin. Fred or one of the four other lads. Then a whole catalogue of horrors would follow – swollen
ankles, heartburn, piles – oh dearie me, those piles. And that was before they got on to the birth itself. Don’t tell me! Rachel always wanted to scream. She would leave the room, upset
and furious. She wanted them to give her sympathy, not fill her head full of terrifying ideas about what might be to come!

Then this weekend the Morrison boys and a few other hangers-on had hauled their old perambulator out into the yard and spent a happy hour sloshing water over it – and each other, naturally
– and polishing it up, with Mo trying to supervise the proceedings and getting almost as wet as them. When Rachel saw it sitting out to dry in the sun, it had made her stomach turn with a
mixture of excitement and dread. A pram – for a real baby!

‘Danny,’ she said miserably. ‘Come ’ere, will you?’

Danny directed a vicious right hook at some invisible opponent. Rachel watched him. It was one of those moments when she was filled with bitter envy. It might be that Danny was this baby’s
father, but what difference did it make to him? His body was just as it had been before and his life would just go on as it had. She was the one having to put up with all this discomfort and not
being able to lie comfortably in bed. Let alone walking about all day at work.

‘
Danny.
’

‘Wha’?’ He lunged again.

‘I want you.’

‘Oh . . . All right.’ He bounced onto the bed. ‘What’s up?’

‘I just feel . . . I’m scared, Danny.’ The tears came then. ‘I don’t know what it’s going to be like. Feel it –’

He placed his hand on her. Arms and legs were lurching about inside her drum of a belly. Their eyes met. She snuggled closer to him.

‘It’s a bit like having a bomb inside you,’ she said tearfully. ‘You never know when it’s going to go off and what it’s going to be like.’

‘Don’t be daft,’ Danny said. Though she sensed that he too was frightened. He was about to be a father and he had only just turned seventeen.

‘You’ll be all right,’ Danny said. ‘You’re good at things, you are. And you’ll be all right at that an’ all.’

She pressed her cheek against his warm chest, a little comforted. ‘That’s a nice thing to say,’ she said. ‘We’ll have to see, won’t we?’ She looked at
him with big eyes. ‘Give us a cuddle,’ she said. ‘I need you near me.’

So he took her in his arms and they held each other close. Rachel kissed his salty neck, feeling, in those moments, as if she had everything she needed in the world.

August 1941

‘Don’t forget your change, bab!’

‘Oh – ta.’ Rachel turned back with her bag of shopping to take the coins the woman was holding out to her in the baker’s shop.

‘You must be well off,’ a woman joked in the queue. ‘I’ll ’ave it off yer if you don’t want it – not that there’s much to spend it on these
days!’

The other women laughed and Rachel smiled vaguely.

‘That’s how you get when you’re that far on,’ someone else commented. ‘You can’t remember if you’re coming or going.’

Rachel had now given up work as the baby was due any day. She felt self-conscious walking the streets, all big at the front and wearing a baggy floral dress that Dolly had lent her.

‘I know it ain’t pretty,’ Dolly said as both of them eyed the frumpy frock with sludge green leaves all over it. ‘Makes you feel like a sack of taters – but
it’s comfy enough. I’m hoping never to need it again but I daren’t give it away – it’d be tempting fate!’

Gladys kept telling Rachel that she wasn’t having her sitting around being waited on hand and foot – she could get out and do something useful if she wasn’t bringing in any
wages. So Rachel had taken on some of the shopping.

Before she finished work, leaving Bird’s sadly behind her, she went to visit her mother. Every time she saw her, Peggy looked at her with disdain.

‘The state of you,’ she had remarked several times. She seemed ashamed and embarrassed by the sight of her pregnant daughter.

Rachel told Cissy that she might not see her for a little while but that soon she would be giving her a new little friend to play with. Cissy, at least, looked entranced at this news.

These days Rachel felt neither happy nor sad about the baby. She just felt as if she was in a haze most of the time and all she wanted to do was lie down and sleep. She was just heading into the
greengrocer’s when she almost collided with someone else in the doorway.

‘Oh!’ Rachel cried, startled, one hand instantly protecting her body and the baby.

‘Sorry!’ the other girl cried. She was a frail-looking, mousey-haired, blue-eyed person, not much older than Rachel, with a rather sweet face and dressed in a mauve shirtwaister
dress that hung loosely on her skinny frame. Her wispy brown hair was dragged back any old how. She also seemed to have been in another world.

‘Oh – sorry,’ she said again. She stared at Rachel’s prominent belly, then into her face. Tears came very abruptly and ran down her cheeks. She turned away and could not
seem to stop crying. Rachel was not quite sure what to do.

‘You all right?’ she asked awkwardly. ‘Did I hurt you?’

The girl turned back, wiping her face. ‘Yes. No. I’m all right – only, I was expecting as well and my baby died, just last month. I was well on but it wasn’t moving and
the doctor said . . . They made me have him, but there wasn’t a breath of life in him . . .’ She crumpled into grief again. ‘And now they’ve called up my Francis, God love
him, and – well, I don’t know when I’ll see him and I just . . .’ She broke down again. ‘I just want a baby – that’s all. God, all I need is to hold a baby
in my arms!’

Rachel felt her throat begin to ache in sympathy with the other girl, who looked not much older than herself.

‘I’m sorry for you,’ she said. ‘That’s a terrible thing to happen.’

‘I’ve just got to get over it,’ the girl said. ‘Only with my Francis going as well – and I’m moving back in with my mother – what’s the use in
paying two lots of rent? And I just . . .’ She shook her head, unable to go on.

Rachel wasn’t sure what to say. She just stood there, feeling sorry.

The girl pulled herself together eventually and told her that her name was Netta Fitzpatrick. They parted, wishing each other luck.

Afterwards she could not stop thinking of Netta and her distraught grief after giving birth to a dead child. Feeling her own baby’s vigorous movements, she realized that she had a lot of
luck already.

It was sometime in the middle of the night when it began. Rachel, lying restlessly on her left side, trying to get comfortable, woke as a warm gush of liquid arrived suddenly
in the bed.

Ugh, she thought. I’ve wet myself. How can I have done that? She struggled out of bed to get away from the wet sheets. As she stood up, her abdomen clenched like a vice and she doubled up
over the bed.

‘Danny!’ she gasped. ‘Wake up – I’m having it!’ This ended in a wail as the pain reached its peak, then died off.

‘What?’ Danny shot up in bed. Seconds later, he was down the stairs and shouting, ‘Auntie! Help!’

‘Rachel?’ Gladys came in with a candle. She took one look at her. ‘Get off the bed, wench, so I can change it. Danny’s gone to fetch the midwife.’

Gladys stripped back the bedclothes with their thin, bloody smell. Rachel stood helpless by the bed, a heavy, dragging feeling inside her. She heard the crackle of newspaper: copies of the
Birmingham Evening Despatch
which Gladys was laying over the mattress.

‘I’ve got the water on,’ Gladys was saying, more to herself than anything. ‘Plenty of water . . . Thank the Lord there’s no raids . . .’

As she moved swiftly round the room arranging things so that they were in place for the birth, they heard footsteps thundering into the house and up the stairs. Danny came charging in.

‘Rach – you all right? I’ve been and got the midwife . . .’

‘Well, where is she?’ Gladys demanded.

‘I told her,’ Danny panted. He stood by the chair and put his hand on Rachel’s shoulder. ‘Then I came back.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ Gladys erupted. ‘Go and meet her – the poor wench’ll never find this house on her own in the pitch dark!’

Danny tore off again. By the time two sets of footsteps were approaching, Rachel was back on the bed on a square of old sheet laid over the crackling newspaper, in the throes of another clamping
bout of pain. She knelt, pressing her forehead into the pillow, and try as she could to keep quiet, groans of pain escaped her.

‘There you go,’ a brisk voice said beside her as she surfaced. She had not been aware of anyone coming into the room.

‘You – off downstairs,’ she heard Gladys saying.

‘But Auntie!’ Danny protested.

‘This is no place for a lad. Go on – hoppit.’

‘How are we doing?’ the voice said again.

Rachel moaned. ‘All right,’ she managed to say.

‘Can you turn on your back for me?’ Things were being brought out of a bag beside her, the midwife putting them on the chest of drawers. ‘I’ll need to have a little look
at you.’

‘You look young,’ Gladys said. ‘Not much older than her on there.’

Rachel looked up into a pair of brown, smiling eyes, the face topped by black curly hair.

‘I’m Nurse Biggins, student midwife,’ the young woman said. ‘And I’m going to look after you. I don’t think I’ve seen you at the clinic?’

Rachel was bewildered. What was she talking about?

‘No,’ Gladys said quietly.

‘How old are you then . . .?’

‘Rachel,’ Gladys put in.

‘Rachel?’

‘Sixteen . . .’

‘Ah – I am a little older than you after all,’ she said, smiling.

Rachel could feel the first rumbles of another pain coming and she drew her legs up and murmured, ‘Oh no . . .’ Surely with it hurting this much there must be something terribly
wrong?

The young woman said, ‘Oh – I see. We’ll wait until that’s over . . . You’ve got water on the boil downstairs?’ she said to Gladys. ‘Thank you –
you seem to have done a marvellous job in getting prepared.’

Once the next pain had passed the midwife examined her. Rachel gasped with shock as Nurse Biggins pressed her fingers up inside her. She had had no idea there would be all this. It would
normally have felt very odd and embarrassing but just at the moment she did not really care.

‘You’re quite well on,’ the midwife said. ‘Lucky for a first one – it can take a long time. And everything’s looking very normal.’

‘Would you like a cup of tea, nurse?’ Gladys asked. There was respect in her voice, awe almost.