War Babies (6 page)

Peggy, at rare intervals in Fred Horton’s endless flow of talk, tried to involve her new stepson in conversation.

‘I hear you’re doing very well at the wire factory,’ she said to Sidney.

Sidney, his mouth full, nodded and grunted in reply.

‘A great firm,’ Fred said. ‘They made the first transatlantic cable – thirty thousand miles of it. Think of that!’ He seemed considerably more impressed with this
than Sidney himself did.

‘I always think it’s marvellous to be apprenticed somewhere very good like that and to move up through the firm,’ Peggy said, trying hard. ‘It gives you such a firm
base.’

‘I wasn’t apprenticed,’ Sidney said, with obvious hostility.

‘Just a factory hand, I’m afraid,’ Fred said.

Rachel saw Sidney look directly at her mother for the first time, with an insolent stare. Chewing slowly, he emptied his mouth, then said, ‘So, you’re a market trader?’

Rachel felt her stomach lurch at the tone of his voice. She knew how much Mom loathed rudeness. She pushed the tough bits of liver round her plate. The sharp tone of Peggy’s reply was
unmistakeable.

‘I have a little business, yes – as a wardrobe dealer.’

‘Had Peggy,
had
,’ Fred insisted. ‘But those days are over now.’

‘I had a good little business,’ Peggy defended herself. ‘I built it all up myself.’

‘Oh, very fine – of course,’ Fred laughed, humouring her. ‘But you can put all that behind you now. Peggy’s a fine little seamstress and buyer. She can make up
things to sell – and on some days she’ll help me in the shop.’

‘Funny,’ Sidney said, looking insolently round the table. ‘I remember
my mother
saying that the market people were rough as dirt – nothing better than
gypsies.’ He turned his sludgy eyes on his father. ‘I don’t remember you disagreeing with her.’

There were frozen seconds of silence.

‘That’s enough of that,’ Fred ordered. Rachel saw that her mother’s face was flushed with fury and she was pressing her lips together. ‘No more of that talk.’
To Peggy he said, ‘Alice didn’t know much about the work – the noble work – of the markets. She’d led rather a sheltered life.’

‘But they are a bunch of gyppos, aren’t they?’ Sidney said, addressing his remaining potatoes with a suppressed snigger. ‘Everyone says so.’

Rachel heard her mother’s voice snake across the table, low with rage. ‘I’ll thank you to find some manners and not keep on about things you know nothing about. I’ll have
you know, I’ve been perfectly capable of earning my own living and I’ll do so again if necessary. No one’s doing me any favours, young man, and don’t you forget
it.’

Rachel’s heart was banging hard. She kept her head down, wondering what on earth was coming next.

‘Leave the table, Sidney.’ Fred’s voice was heavy with anger as well. ‘And don’t come back unless you can find yourself some manners. Go on!’ he shouted, as
Sidney showed no signs of moving. ‘You’re old enough to know better than to talk to a lady like that. And this lady is my wife, so you’d better get used to it, or you can find
somewhere else to hang your hat!’

Sidney got up slowly, smirking.

‘Go on – get out, you idle little bugger!’ Fred bawled at him. His son slouched from the room and slammed the door.

There was a terrible silence. Rachel’s blood was thudding. She had never heard such shouting and carry-on in her own home. She stared into her lap, her fingers clasped round the tassels of
the pale green chenille tablecloth. She heard Fred move his chair back.

‘I’m sorry, Peggy,’ he said, sounding very contrite as he moved round the table to her. Rachel was surprised by the gentleness of his voice.

‘I won’t be spoken to like that!’ Peggy snapped. ‘We need to start as we mean to go on.’ Rachel could hear that she was close to tears as well. She tilted her head
to look at her mother and saw that she was quivering with emotion. Fred Horton was leaning over her, his arm round her shoulders.

‘I’ve had enough,’ Peggy went on, ‘of being treated like that by people who . . .’ The tears came then. She couldn’t hold them back. ‘Oh God!’ she
cried, hands over her face.

‘He’ll come round,’ Fred said. ‘I suppose he hasn’t got over his mother. He’s not a bad lad really.’

Peggy didn’t reply and Fred held her, trying to give comfort. ‘It’s all right, my dear, my darling Peggy. Don’t take any notice. All that matters is you and me,
isn’t it?’ He lowered his head and rested his cheek against Peggy’s. ‘No one else – just us two?’

Rachel slipped from her seat and left the room. She looked about anxiously to see if Sidney Horton was outside the door but there was no sign of him. Then she tore along the shadowy landing to
her bedroom at the end. Peggy had made the bed up for her and she lay down in the dusky light, on an eiderdown that stank of mothballs. She hated everything about this new life she was being forced
into. Everything was wrong – it even smelt wrong. And she had to live with these horrible, rude men. But most of all she kept hearing Fred Horton’s soft, persuasive voice –
‘All that matters is you and me . . .’ She knew that she counted for nothing. She felt the big, alien house around her and she had never felt more lonely and bereft. She curled tightly
on the cold sheen of the eiderdown and let the sobs begin to shake their way out of her.

October 1938

‘Rach – wait for me!’

Rachel was on the way to school along the Coventry Road. It was a blustery morning, filthy puddles in the gutters, the carts and cars splashing through them. She turned, face screwed up in the
mizzling rain, to see a thin, pale girl called Lilian struggling towards her. Rachel smiled, cheered by the sight. Over these past miserable months, the arrival of Lilian and her family was by far
the best thing that had happened.

Lilian caught her up, wheezing and pressing a hand on her chest. ‘Don’t go so fast – I can’t keep up,’ she complained.

Lilian was a sweet, sickly little thing with long, white-blonde hair which clung flat to her head and was tied up loosely behind. She was wearing a brown tweed coat which was too big for her and
a felt hat, and she had very white skin through which you could see mauve veins at her temples. There were blue shadows under her pale blue eyes. She was thin as a twig. And she was nice. Like
Peggy, Lilian’s mother had been widowed and remarried, and Lilian had just one baby brother, ten years younger. Unlike Rachel she had a mother and stepfather who were kindly people and went
out of their way to look after her and pay her attention.

Mrs Davies stayed at home to look after the little boy, Bobby, and they were happy for Rachel to come round any time she wanted to. She had taken Lilian back to Fred Horton’s house once to
meet her mother, but now they always went to Lilian’s. She would do anything to get out of Horton’s – as she called it to herself, never ‘home’ – as often as
possible.

The girls scuttled from one shop awning to another, trying to dodge the rain.

‘Stop a minute,’ Lilian begged, when they’d dashed under another one. She stood propped against a box of pears on the greengrocer’s outside display, her lungs
heaving.

‘You feeling poorly?’ Rachel asked. Lilian’s chest sounded really bad.

‘I’m all right. Just need to catch my breath.’

As they set off again, Rachel said, ‘Can I come round yours later?’

Lilian’s mother, Mrs Davies, was a blonde, homely woman, who always gave Rachel a warm welcome and was glad to have company for Lilian.

Lilian shrugged. ‘Course.’ She peered at Rachel. ‘Why don’t you ever want to go home?’

It was Rachel’s turn to shrug. ‘I just don’t, that’s all.’

Stepping inside Horton’s filled her with dread. It was like moving from light into darkness.

Ever since Peggy married Fred Horton, she had given up her hard-earned regular pitch on the market and worked alongside him in the brown surroundings of the shop. She was good at selling,
cutting lengths of cloth with long-bladed scissors, measuring strips of lining or ropes of brocade with tassels, doling out threads and pins, tailor’s chalk and needles, spools and zip
fasteners. She also let it be known that the business now offered a tailoring and alteration service. When she was not in the shop, moving around on the swell of Fred’s patter, she was
occupied in the back room of the house. She had cleared out the storeroom and put a table in there for sewing. The needle of the sewing machine seemed to
chuk-chuk
up and down almost
without stopping. And she hated any interruption.

Peggy was in Fred’s thrall. As a young child, Rachel had sensed that her mother did not relish her company, but after Harold Mills’s death, neither of them had anyone else. Nowadays,
her mother gave off an impatient air of busyness and boredom at the very sight of her. She had far too much to do to be bothered occupying a child – important business demands. What’s
more, she had something she had never had before – a devoted husband.

Fred adored Peggy. He adored her so much it was sickening. Slobbered over her, Rachel thought. The picture of his first wife Alice in its decorative silver frame, which had been in the parlour
upstairs when they arrived, had since disappeared. Fred needed a woman. Peggy was queen. Rachel could see, jealously, that this dumpy man held genuine affection for her mother. This she could not
deny. But this new coupling was so tight at the joins that it left no room for anyone else. Their evenings were spent sitting comfortably in the back room, the wireless on or reading the newspaper.
When she came into the room they looked up as if to say, ‘Oh – are you here?’ They wanted no one else.

‘Off you go – run and play,’ she was told constantly. Either that or ‘Sit quiet for a bit,’ or ‘It’s time you were in bed.’ But who, in this dark,
soulless house, was she meant to play with, and where? Meals were almost the only times she saw her mother. She had less and less of Peggy’s attention.

Several times, after they had all gone to bed, Rachel crept along the dark passage wanting her mother, even just to hear the sound of her breathing and know she was there. She moved as lightly
as she could, stopping at the door of the front bedroom and pressing her ear to the wood. Mostly there was silence. Once she heard Fred Horton snoring. Another time, both their voices and strange,
blurred grunting sounds. She never did dare to call out. Each time she slunk back to bed, uncomforted.

It was no better in the daytime.

‘Leave me in peace, Rachel, for goodness’ sake,’ Peggy would snap at her. ‘I’ve got an order to finish.’

Rachel sometimes stood down at the door of the back room. She watched her mother’s neat form busy at the sewing machine in her powder-blue dress, or her dusty pink dress, each made by her
own hands. Peggy’s hair would be pinned back out of her eyes. Her body would rock slowly as her foot worked the treadle of the machine. Sooner or later, when Rachel could not resist making a
slight noise to let her mother know she was there, an arm would shoot out to shoo her away. Peggy did not even turn round. ‘Go on – off you go. Find something to occupy you.’ Even
her back seemed to give off a forbidding message.
Don’t bother me.

The only time her mother looked after her with her eyes fully on her was for a couple of days when Rachel was in bed with a stomach upset. Then she had sat with her a while and been kinder and
more motherly. But mostly it felt as if Peggy was moving away from her down a long, gloomy corridor, further and further until she would be gone altogether. Rachel imagined this sometimes –
the colour of her mother’s dress fading away into dark nothingness – and fear would stop her breath.

She could have borne all this: feeling she was a nuisance. Mom was there, at least. Fred treated her well enough, for a stepchild; not unkindly. She was fed and clothed, had a bed to sleep in.
He was not cruel as such. He just had no interest in her at all. But at least she had a friend in Lilian.

She could tell Lilian some things – that she did not like her stepfather, that her mother was forever busy. What she could not put into words was the way Peggy had betrayed her when it
came to Sidney Horton.

In the beginning, Sidney, who was nineteen, had been as interested in Rachel as in a speck of dust under his feet. But by the time they had been living there for a few weeks,
his gaze had swivelled round and fixed on her. She was now a thirteen-year-old and with her mother’s big-eyed, pretty looks, though she was fleshier than Peggy, pink cheeked, with straight,
shiny brown hair cut in a bob to her jaw.

When she passed him in the hall, or upstairs, he started saying, ‘Hello,
Rachel
,’ in a funny way she didn’t like, mocking, sneering. She would just whisper back and
hurry past, never looking at him. She started to feel him eyeing her while they were listening to his father droning on about the day’s business. Evidently Sidney was just as bored as she
was.

One afternoon, at the end of a very close, hot day, she was sitting on the stairs. She often sat there, on a step near to the top, because she didn’t feel comfortable or at home anywhere
else. Peggy told her to move if she came across her there.

‘It doesn’t look good for the customers, you sitting there. And they can see your knickers.’

But Rachel didn’t care. She did it all the more.

She was reading a book of girls’ stories, about saints and heroines. Caught up in a tale, she was only faintly aware that someone had come in at the back door through the kitchen, his
boots clumping along towards the stairs. Through the banisters she saw his sludgy hair come past, the thick neck and slouching shoulders. Her heart slammed with panic. Don’t let him be coming
upstairs! It was too late to move away.

Sidney put his foot on the first step, his left hand on the banister. His sleeves were rolled in the heat, to show hairy arms. He always looked dishevelled.

‘A
ha
– what’s this then?’ He spoke in the tone people used for telling stories, when the fox spots the chicken, or the wolf claps eyes on Little Red Riding
Hood.