Tuppence To Spend (17 page)

A sound at the door made them both turn. Sammy stood there, framed in the doorway, his face white beneath its shadowing of grime. His blue eyes were enormous.

‘I heard what you were saying,’ he said in a trembling voice. ‘She
is
going to die, isn’t she? My mummy – she
is
going to die …’

Early in July the terror they had all been waiting for came at last, with the first of the daylight raids. Eighteen people were killed at Kingston Cross and one of the gasholders at Rudmore was set on fire. Frank Budd had got caught on his way home from work and told Tommy Vickers he’d seen dead bodies at Drayton Road School, which was being used as a First Aid post. It wasn’t casualties that had been brought in, though, it was the First Aid people themselves. The school had been completely destroyed.

Sammy didn’t know what to do. He sat beside his mother, trembling, wondering how to get her down to the shelter. She was too weak to get out of bed, now, and had to be helped to sit on the chamber pot that was kept under the bed. The noise overhead was terrible, worse than any thunderstorm. He could hear planes roaring and screaming above him, and the crashes of the exploding bombs. The
house shook and rattled about his ears, and he crouched beside the bed, terrified. He pictured Germans landing in the street outside, forcing their way into the house and storming up the stairs to get him.

Nora’s blue eyes stared down at him, almost black, like holes in her paper-white face. It looked like a mask of terror. ‘Go down the shelter, Sammy,’ she whispered urgently. ‘Go on.’

‘I can’t! I can’t!’ He was too afraid to move, too afraid to leave the house and venture into the garden. The thought of being exposed to the planes that thundered overhead was too much for him. They’d see him, they’d drop a bomb on him. And even if he had been able to pluck up the courage, he couldn’t go without his mother … ‘I can’t leave you here by yourself.’

Nora’s mouth twisted wryly. She had spent three days in the hospital, suffering the discomfort of various tests, and knew that she was dying. It didn’t seem to matter very much now whether it was the illness that carried her off or a German bomb. The bomb would at least be quick … ‘Go down the shelter, Sammy. Please. For me.’

But he shook his head and climbed up on the bed, burrowing his head against her. Nora wrapped her thin arms about him and held him there, and they lay close together, listening to the screaming of the aircraft and the thunder of the bombs; until the skies fell silent at last and the lonely sound of the ‘All Clear’ signal, rose like a lament for those who had died.

Nora sighed. She was exhausted by the noise, by the fear and by the effort of keeping awake for Sammy’s sake. She wanted nothing more than to drift into sleep.

‘Make us a cup of tea, there’s a love,’ she whispered into her son’s ear. ‘They’ve gone now. They won’t come back today. You can go downstairs now, can’t you, and make your mum a cup of tea.’

Sammy lifted his head. His face was white, and stained
with tears and dirt. He sniffed and wiped his nose with his sleeve.

‘Is the war over now, Mum?’ he asked. ‘Have the Germans come to get us?’

She looked at him and realised how difficult it was for a child to understand. They were told so little. All these other countries, squabbling over each other, were beyond them. They had no idea what war could be like, or how long it could last.

‘No,’ she said, ‘the war isn’t over yet. But the Germans haven’t come to get us. We’ve sent them away, see. Now, get me that cup of tea, there’s a good boy.’ And as Sammy went downstairs, still cautiously just in case there might be a German lurking behind the scullery door, she lay back and closed her eyes.

I’m not going to see this war through, she thought, with a cold feeling around her heart, and for the first time she was glad that Gordon had been sent to the approved school, where he would at least be safe.

But what was going to happen to Sammy?

As the doctor had promised, the district nurse came every day and washed Nora’s body and gave her the tablets the doctor had prescribed. Gordon had been brought home, sullen-faced and silent, and then taken straight back to Drayton. He sat beside her for a while, but she didn’t wake up and his face was set with misery when he had to leave.

For Sammy it was a bad dream, a dream that went on and on, and from which there was no awakening. He roamed aimlessly through the days, spending as much time as he could beside his mother before being sent outside ‘to play’ by the district nurse or the neighbours. But he was afraid to go far away, in case there was another air raid, and anyway there was nobody to play with – only Micky Baxter and a couple of his mates who hadn’t gone back to the country, and Sammy was afraid to be friends with Micky.
There were a few girls – Rose Budd and her friend Joy from the papershop, and two or three others – but they were much older than Sammy and wouldn’t have dreamed of playing with him. Rose didn’t even like talking to him, and he’d heard her grumble to her mother once when Jess had brought her up to number 2 to see Nora.

‘It’s a horrible house. It’s all dirty and it smells.’

‘Mrs Hodges is very ill and can’t do her housework or cooking. That’s why me and your Auntie Annie and Mrs Vickers are helping out. It wouldn’t do you any harm to give a hand too, Rose.’

Rose wrinkled her nose in disgust. ‘I’ll get the shopping, but I’m not coming in the house. And I’m not taking that kid, he’s got nits.’

Sammy did have nits. He was very rarely without them. When he’d been able to go to school and the ‘nit-lady’ had come round to examine the children’s heads, he had been regularly sent home with a bottle of black tar shampoo and told to ask his mother to wash his hair. He’d had to sit at a desk separate from the other children too, along with the other ‘nits’. It made another excuse for the bigger ones to jeer at him in the playground.

It wasn’t just nits, either. His legs and sometimes his body were peppered with flea bites. Tibby’s fur was full of fleas and sometimes the cat nearly went mad with them, leaping about all over the place as if he were a flea himself. You couldn’t get rid of them so you just had to get used to them.

‘We’re going to have to get that cat destroyed,’ Dan said. ‘The government’s been on about it long enough. They want all pets done away with. It’s for their own good,’ he added, seeing Nora’s horror. ‘I mean, what’s going to happen to them in the bombing raids? You can’t keep an animal down the shelter, specially as we ain’t allowed proper doors. He’ll run off and we’ll never see him again.
He might get bombed himself. Or the place’ll be overrun with cats and dogs all gone wild.’

‘Yes, but he’s all Sammy’s got now. We can’t take his cat away from him. Anyway, he was all right in that raid we had the other week, he must have hid somewhere and he came in same as usual, wanting his supper.’

But she had no energy for argument. She slipped back into sleep and Dan looked at her and shook his head. One of these days, he knew, she’d slip away from him altogether, and then
he’d
have nothing. What was a cat beside a wife like Nora?

The weeks slid by and Nora faded a little more each day. She had to be given more and more of the painkilling pills the doctor prescribed, then it had to be injections given by the nurse. She moaned and muttered, crying out that there were eyes watching her, hundreds of staring eyes, or that she could hear animals scratching at the door. She seemed to think she had just given birth to a baby and begged for it to be put into her arms. She stared at Dan as if he were a stranger and tried to push him away, and one day she told Sammy he was a nasty little boy and she didn’t want him in the house again.

‘She doesn’t mean it,’ Freda Vickers said, coming in to find him sobbing broken-heartedly on the bottom stair. ‘She doesn’t know what she’s saying. You know she loves you.’

‘Not any more,’ he wept. ‘She doesn’t love me any more. Nobody loves me now.’ He gripped the cat hard against him. ‘Only Tibby.’

To Freda’s relief, Nora woke next morning almost like her old self, and called for Sammy to come and give her a kiss before he went to school. He didn’t remind her that there was no school now, but buried his face against her thin breast. She stroked his head, asking what had upset him so much, but he couldn’t tell her and after a few minutes she slipped again into her uneasy sleep.

There was another raid in the middle of August, exactly a month after the first. Old Portsmouth got it bad and Dan said you could see the Harbour Railway Station on fire from Camber dock. After the last raid he’d moved the bed downstairs to the front room, and he came home to find that Freda Vickers and Annie Chapman had managed to get Nora down to the shelter and stayed there with her and Sammy. He thanked them gruffly but Nora begged them to leave her where she was next time. ‘It hurts too much, being moved, and I feel so sick … So long as my Sammy’s all right …’

‘I don’t see how we can do that,’ Freda said to Tommy. ‘I couldn’t sit easy in the shelter, knowing she was all by herself in the house. I don’t know what we’re to do, I’m sure.’

Sammy went to the shops every day. He was getting used to doing the shopping now and knew what to ask for. He spent hours standing in queues, hoping that whatever he wanted would still be available when he finally reached the counter and sometimes getting shoved to the back before the shopkeeper noticed him and called him over. Mr Hines, the butcher, had a soft spot for him, as he did for all children, and glared angrily at the other customers when they pushed past Sammy, telling them they ought to be ashamed of themselves. ‘This nipper’s ma’s ill in bed, has been for weeks,’ he said. ‘She’s only got him to get the groceries and you lot can’t do no better than push in in front of him. You don’t deserve no rations.’

‘We thought he was with someone,’ one or two said in aggrieved tones, but most of them did look ashamed and one said she was after a nice bit of oxtail, but if the nipper wanted it he could have it. ‘It makes a lovely gravy, oxtail does. That’ll build his mum up.’

Sammy had the oxtail, and a bit of bacon too that Mr Hines had put by, and then ran down October Street, watched all the way by old Mrs Kinch who was standing as
usual at her front door, and along to his own house. He flung himself in through the front door, dropped the shopping on the table and scurried upstairs.

‘Mum! Mum, I’m back. I’ve got some oxtail, a lady said it would make gravy to build you up, and Mr Hines give me a bit of bacon knuckle and – Mum?’ He stopped by the bed, staring down in panic.

Nora was lying very still and white. Her eyelids fluttered and she opened her eyes. There was still a flicker of life in them, but he knew that it was fading fast.

He fell to his knees, gripping her thin hand.

‘Mum,’ he whispered. ‘Mum, don’t …’

Her eyes flicked over his face. There was the faintest ghost of a smile about her blue lips. A breath of sound escaped and he heard the words she had sung to him as a baby.

‘Sammy … Sammy … shine a light …
Ain’t you playing out tonight?’

There was a tiny pause. Her fingers moved, as if she were trying to lift them to his face. Almost without knowing what he did, he brought her hand to his cheek and held it there, cold and bony.

‘My Sammy,’ she whispered. ‘My angel …’

Her eyelids fluttered a little, then closed. The last soft breath escaped her lips in a sigh and her head lolled to one side.

Sammy stared at her. He shook her hand gently. He touched her face and kissed her. And then, with the tears rolling silently down his cheeks, he climbed up on the bed and lay beside her cooling body.

Nora was buried in the churchyard of St Lucy’s, the little church at the top of the street, where she had taken Sammy on Christmas Day. The funeral was attended by Dan and his two sons, and a few neighbours. Frank Budd, who had known Dan for years, took a couple of hours off from the dockyard and came in his best suit, and Jess stood beside him in her grey coat and hat with a black band round it. Tommy and Freda were there, together with Ted and Annie Chapman, and Peggy Shaw who lived next door to the Budds. There were others from April Grove and March and October Streets as well – Florrie and Jim Parkinson, the Hackers and old Mr Cornwell leaning on his two sticks. Nobody knew quite why he had come, since he had never spoken to Nora and it was doubtful that he even knew she existed, and Tommy muttered to his wife that he’d probably seen the little procession walking up the street and thought it was Sunday.

The coffin looked ridiculously small as they stood in the church, singing a wavering and uncertain hymn that none of them knew. ‘Day of wrath! O day of mourning!’ Freda sang and thought how frightening it sounded. She glanced at Sammy, in the pew in front of her, and wondered what he was making of it. ‘Oh, what fear man’s bosom rendeth.’ Perhaps the words would be too difficult for him; she hoped so, anyway. Gordon, standing beside him, had a sullen look on his face that might mean he was trying not to cry, but could just as easily be fury at being brought home
just for this, knowing he had to go back to the approved school at Drayton immediately afterwards.

He hadn’t seen his mother since the time they’d realised how ill she was and brought him home to visit her. It seemed cruel, Freda thought. He was still no more than a nipper and, no matter what he’d done, he ought to have had the chance to be with his mum at the end. It was enough to set him against authority for life.

But there was more to worry about than funerals and boys like Gordon, who was at least being well looked after. There had been another raid a couple of days earlier, the worst so far, with over a hundred killed, so it was said, and hundreds more hurt or bombed out of their homes. One of the cinemas had been hit, right in the middle of the children’s Saturday morning pictures, and the Baptist church next door to it badly damaged too. Luckily, not many of the kiddies were hurt but it brought it home to you how dangerous it was for them in Portsmouth now.

After the funeral the raids grew even worse – one or more almost every day. Hilsea gasworks was hit and a lot of houses round about. That was getting a bit too close to home, Freda said to her husband as they ate salt cod for their supper.