LITMIR.BIZ

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had been engaged to who died on the beach in Normandy around D-Day. She’d heard it from Mrs Emmerson and it had been the first time she’d known it, for in the letters Hannah had written to her mother, she’d not mentioned a word of it. ‘I think he took part of her heart with him and that’s the truth,’ Gloria said. ‘That’s why she wants no other.’

      So why then did she pin the rest of it on Arthur Bradley? Josie thought. ‘She doesn’t love him,’ she’d cried in protest to Gloria. ‘She can’t love him.’

      ‘What’s love, pet?’ Gloria asked sadly. ‘I didn’t love my husband, but we got along all right. No children, and that was a blow to take, but it meant we were able to work hard. He had a shop then and it did all right. But when he dropped dead of a heart attack when we’d been married just ten years, I sold the shop, lock, stock and barrel and bought this place.

      ‘I could have married a man I loved and one that loved me,’ she went on. ‘And there was one. But with him, I’d probably be living in some back-to-back slum with a squad of children and not a half-penny to bless myself with. I did what I had to do for me and Hannah’s doing the same.’

      ‘What happened to the other man – the one you loved?’ Josie asked, intrigued by Gloria’s revelations.

      ‘He went to America,’ Gloria said with a shrug, and a flush of shame coloured her face for a split second as she went on. ‘Told me I’d broke his heart. Stuff and nonsense, of course. Don’t you worry none about Hannah. She wants a home of her own and someone to care for her.’

      But did he care for her? Privately, Josie doubted it. They didn’t match somehow either. It was like a snail getting married to a butterfly.

      Still, a wedding was a wedding. And something to write to Eileen Donnelly about. She’d been her friend at school in Wicklow. When she’d been so homesick, Hannah had advised her to write to someone and tell her how she felt. She said it might help.

      And it did. Josie wrote reams and reams, covering page after page with how depressing the place was, the noise, the traffic, the squashed-up houses, the stinking factories that tipped their filth and waste into the sluggish brown canal. She told her of the greyness, the drabness, the absence of green meadows and mountains and streams, and she begged for news from home.

      When Eileen’s reply had arrived, Josie had been so disappointed that she’d cried. Eileen said everything was just the same and her mother was having another baby.

      There was so much Josie longed to know. So her next letter was full of questions which Eileen answered, but briefly and without elaboration in any shape or form.

      By that time, Josie was well settled into the Abbey school. She’d thought her accent might have made her the butt of jokes, but she found many of the children were Irish, or from Irish families, and she was soon settled in. She got on well with the girls in her class and made a special friend of a girl called Mary Byrne who also lived nearby. She found the teachers very strict, not at all like the sleepy easy-going village school she’d gone to.

      Her sisters always said she could count herself lucky, for there had been no village school for them and they were taught at the convent, almost three miles away, while the boys went to the Brothers’ almost as far away.

      But it wasn’t the distance alone. They’d always told her that the nuns were the very devil and they’d beat the hands off you for the merest thing. The village school had come to Josie’s rescue and although they might have been shouted at, Josie never saw anyone struck.

      That wasn’t the case at the Abbey school and she knew her sisters had been right about the devilish nuns that taught them being hot on punishment, for the headmistress at the Abbey was a nun from the nearby St Agnes Convent. She wielded a cane to help exert her authority and had no hesitation in using it. Sometimes, after playtime was over, there was a line of children, who’d been sent in by the dinner ladies, waiting outside the headmistress’s room, to be ‘dealt with’.

      So far, Josie had never had the cane, but the prospect of it was held over their heads like the Sword of Damocles. But school didn’t occupy her whole life and with the homesickness receding and with Mary at her side, she was finding out some of the advantages of city living and she wrote to Eileen and told her all about it.

      Erdington village is no distance away. Soon, after Hannah’s marriage, it’ll be just at the end of the road. There are so many shops you wouldn’t believe, and crowds of people, like the town on a fair day. But even better, they have a cinema. They do dances there as well, but that’s for older people. They have special films for children on a Saturday morning and it costs sixpence, but most Saturdays Hannah lets me go.

      If not, we can go swimming because they’ve got a proper baths and Hannah has bought me my first bathing costume. She says if you have no choice about a place then you must make the best of it and so I am. There’s a library here too, a massive place with a proper children’s part, and you can borrow two books and keep them for a fortnight.

      She posted that letter with relish, hoping Eileen was consumed with envy on reading it for she was proving a great disappointment as a correspondent.

      And now there was the wedding to brag about. She wished Hannah would be married in a white floor length dress made of silk and decorated with lace and little rosebuds so that she could describe her looking like a princess to Eileen. But she wasn’t wearing white, nor a dress either. ‘It wouldn’t be seemly with everything in such short supply and a wicked waste of clothing coupons,’ Gloria told Josie. ‘That navy costume trimmed with cream is much more practical and it can be worn again. It will look nice enough, especially now Amy’s decorated her hat to match the cream shoes and handbag Hannah has.’

      Hannah looked more than just nice, she looked lovely, but then she always looked lovely. She didn’t look like a bride, that was all. Josie supposed it was more practical, but did you want to be practical on that one day of your life? She did take on board the bit about clothing coupons, though. She knew they were a headache and one of the first things Hannah had to see to after her arrival was to fit her out with a ration book and a set of clothing coupons.

      Josie, coming from the land of plenty in comparison, had imagined that now the war was over, everything would be back to normal, but it was far from that.

      And yet Hannah had used some of those precious clothing coupons to get material for a dress for her that had been made up by Amy. It was pale blue and in shimmering satin that fell from her waist in soft folds. It was the nicest and prettiest dress that Josie had ever owned and she had an Alice band covered in rosebuds holding back her hair and pure white socks and black patent leather shoes.

      That was another thing, her hair. Gloria had given her a hairbrush and said she must brush her hair one hundred times every night to make it shine and after a month or two, when it had got long enough, she rolled rags around it after her bath on Saturday, so that it would be wavy for Mass on Sunday.

      Josie never skimped on the hundred brushes after she’d overheard Amy telling Gloria that Josie’s hair was shining like burnished copper. Burnished copper! Josie said the words to herself, liking the sound of them.

      Amy went on to say that her hair was her best feature, for she was a plain little thing, not a patch on her aunt, but if she made the most of herself as she grew up she’d make a quite presentable turn-out in the end. Josie hadn’t been a bit offended by Amy’s remarks for she knew she only spoke the truth.

      She had no illusions about her looks and if she’d ever had, they’d have been dispelled the day her mother took her as a small child to visit her great-granny, who lived in the hills, and was ill in bed. She’d been taken by the hand into the bedroom where an old toothless lady with a bonnet covering her head had peered at her with small gimlet eyes in a face screwed up in a scowl. ‘Is this the one?’ she said. ‘The afterthought?’

      Then she’d turned her gaze from Josie and looked Frances full in the face and said, ‘Well girl, I don’t know what you’ve done with this one, but she’s as plain as a pike staff.’ And so, at the age of three or four, Josie had learned

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