MARGARET

   I remember as a child looking out of the attic window over the skyline of Leeds, past the nearby goods yard with its shunting coal-trains and the neighbouring wood-yard with its tree-tall planks of new-cut wood.  There was the smell of fresh sawdust that was a rich perfume to my nascent senses.  There was the rattle and bump of horse drawn drays returning empty barrels to the cooper’s yard, which lay behind our small huddle of houses.

   There were the binyards with the lavatories shared between two families and the passageway to the back street that ran between them where we kicked footballs that were too soft and went oomph and fell like dead birds onto the flecked concrete or were too hard and went thwack like a cane and bounced off the walls with the terrifying suddenness of pain.  There were the drainpipes you couldn’t put your hands round and the gable-ends of house rows rising sheer and sudden then disappearing into the clear blue of morning or the dusky turquoise and yellow of night.

   The bins were heavy, immovable with the weight of ashes from the coal-fires.  The white ash was like gossamer blossom as it floated in the air and made you cough.  When there was ice you scattered ashes to make a path and the ice was like knives and the whipping wind made you cry to go back inside the house and curl up on the bit-rug of a thousand snips sewn from old suits on the clothes-horse when the fire was spitting and spatting and the stairs creaked as you went up them.

   Out of the darkness came Auntie Nellie with tears on her cheeks and her heart bursting from her dad’s death and wanting to borrow sheets from mam to lay him out in.  I was sitting at the piano when she came in with the wind and the rain.  It was she who had passed it on to us, a black upright, when she found the brown one she’d always set her heart on.  I was playing

Bobby Shaftoe’s gone to sea

Silver buckles on his knee

When he comes home

He’ll marry me

Bonny Bobby Shaftoe.

   You were the best mam in the world.  You gave us a wonderful childhood.  The pale blue baby-chair where you held me to feed me and change me, the bit-rug you made from scraps of suits, the way you donkey-stoned the front step in grey instead of common yellow.

   Your hair was permed and your brown dress crimped round your waist. You bathed me in the white pot sink with olive-green soap, smelling soft and gentle on your calloused hand with the worn wedding ring on your middle finger.

   There was the cot with its dark-oak bars and coloured transfers of nursery-rhyme teddy bears hunched over bowls of steaming porridge.  While I was in bed with the measles you taught me to read from Old Lob books.  For hours every day you sounded the words with me. You made words my world, threw them to me and let me catch them and toss them in the air and blow them like bubbles with wet coloured windows floating and wobbling like jelly.

   Laying in bed the long summer nights I heard the children playing and your voice and dad’s downstairs as you sewed and scrubbed in the scullery.  You worked on the huge hinged bath-top of pine boards mottled with whirls and whorls, shiny knobby knots that looked as though the clouds had kissed them and left their mark and made us gaze up at the streaming sky.  You hung out the washing on a line that stretched from a crooked hook in the wall to the iron bow tied round the neck of the gas lamp on the corner.

   From my bed I could hear the drays as they rumbled and screed. There was the smell of horse manure mixed with the rising dust and the cries of the drivers and the thwack of leather as it whipped and whapped.

   When summer came it was melting tar, waxy black and so soft you could hold it and mould it in the palm of your hand and see your palm-prints with their wrinkles and waves like the light and dark curls on Auntie Nellie’s scullery door scrolled with a comb by Uncle Bert.  Our living room walls, too, had a touch of fashion when dad did them in cream and dipped a sponge in a bucket of pink and daubed it on, dribbles and all.  The paper was dry and itchy to touch and the smell got into your throat and made you cry.

   Our black upright had a jeweled  pattern on the front in silver grey like a whale’s fin.  There was one dud note that went plunk when you played it.  The white keys were like worn handles of knives and the black ones greasy like old men’s waistcoats.

   Summer days started on my scooter with its solid rubber front tyre and its hand grips at just the right height.  I rushed out onto the path and with a single push of my sandaled foot sailed off.  There was a low cement wall between the cobbled street and the paved path.  Old Mrs. Next-door that nobody liked shuffled out in her slippers to tip over the tea-pot and turn the soggy brown clumps onto the cobbles.  She sold groceries from her cupboard and loaned out money.  If she smiled she looked away because she was a bit like a witch with big eyes and a funny smell all round her.

   Next to her lived Auntie Nellie and she was the best mother I never had.  Her apron took in the whole world and on Monday washday when I helped her turn the handle of the mangle, the suds were all the rainbows from Noah until now and bubbles floated and burst as good as from any clay pipe ever.  When she’d finished the washing she’d set to and bake gold-brown flat-cakes and cut them still hot and spread them with Maypole butter and treacle from the tin with the lion’s picture on.

   There were the long light nights with double summer-time that went on for ever. By the green railings in front of the locked petrol-pumps stood the empty racks for the evening papers. Behind the pumps were the cabinets where they kept cans of oil and the green paint was greasy and faded and the latticed windows of the office were silent and still.

 The river was there, too, under the suspension bridge with its grey camouflage paint and we watched between the struts the coal barges inching along like snails.  Out of the dark waters a girl trying to drown was pulled but like a mermaid she could not live on dry land and when nobody was looking she slipped back.

“I am here, I am waiting”.

   Held down for forty years your voice, Margaret  Hopwood, you came back in the dark night of my soul to rescue me from drowning, sent by God and all His angels.  There were steps down to the tow-path with railings round.  I ran and bounded, scattering the waters’ rainbows of diamonds.  The light was silver-grey, deliquescent.  Murillo painted it, your ragged dress, my torn trousers, your hair a crown of crystal.

   I went with Margaret along the tow-path by the Hollows to where the overhang of warehouses darkened the sky.   Through a crack in the boards we saw lime-sacks spilling acid-white into the warm dark and the air was hot and fusty.  On the Hollows we played tig and catch n’ kiss round earth-mounds covered in clover. Margaret plucked and counted, counted and plucked and when she found the one with four leaves she held it in the air, high and triumphant.

   There had been houses on the Hollows before the war but all that was left was bits of paving stones, jutting window-sills and the tops of white-washed cellar walls.  Weeds and grass grew between the worn cobbles of streets that started and suddenly faded.  Here were castles and dungeons, forests and fields of buttercups and dandelions in thousands and we put them in jam-jars and made grottoes with offerings to the spirits of the Hollows.  Here the adults would never come but occasionally would call us.

2

   The streets belonged to the Railway Company.  The walls of the goodsyards were on three sides of the six streets, so high you could not see over them even from upstairs windows.  We lived in the last house on the front street, next to the binyard.  The front door was painted green and there was a letter-box with the word ‘letters’ above the flap and a knocker attached that nobody had ever used except the school-board man who rat-tat-tatted at eight o’clock one morning when I had been away from school for six weeks with measles.  Dad was a quiet man but he worked in an office and not with his hands like all the other dads in the streets.  He didn’t take to “being told off like the office junior  AND ”he added in a voice of thunder that rolled up and down the street like a storm-cloud, “Don’t you think you can give me all this chelp and get away with it.  I wrote to the school and my, secretary posted the letter weeks ago and you’d better get it sorted out or I’ll be down to see the Chief Education Officer.” You could see he meant it and the boardman went white and in all the time I was at school he never came again.

   Our living room was straight off the street with a ‘Yorkist Range’ fireplace.  The oven was heated by raking hot coals sideways from under the fire.  Once a week mam had to blacklead the grate with strong-smelling liquid she poured from a can onto a cloth, wearing a pair of old stained gloves.  There was a scullery off the living room with a built-in bath that took up most of the room. The hinged lid was a funny shape and low off the floor but it was mam’s only work-surface.  Next to the bath was a door which opened onto the cellar steps.

   In one corner of the living room were the open stairs to the bedrooms.  The big room was mam n’dads and the small one was mine.  On the landing was another set of stairs to the attic with its high double bed and coiled-wire mattress and dusty piles of pre-war ‘Picture Posts’ with sepia pictures of Boer War soldiers standing to attention by piled pyramids of cannon balls.

   From the attic window I looked over Bayfords’ garage and the space in front where we played cricket on the long nights of summer and over the main road with its yard-thick wall to the Hollows and up the hill where the buses trundled past Ellerby Lane School. In the other direction was the suspension bridge over the Aire and the mills along the bank with smoking chimneys and foundries blowing out sparks.

   In my room was a single bed covered by a lime-green counterpane bordered with dangling cotton tassels.  On the wall was the picture of a curly-haired cherub on a swing rock-a-bye babying in a cloud of silver stars and old man moon with a grey beard who looked like Father Time.  I had a book-case painted pale-lemon which had once been a hospital locker and still had a towel-rail screwed to the back.  It was packed with ‘Rupert’ and ‘Eagle’ annuals and thick yellow ‘National Geographic’ magazines handed on from dad’s director at the ‘P & G’ Insurance Company and ‘Biggles’ books that mam read too.  I had ‘The Coral Island’ from Woolworths in a rich red binding and on the cover was a picture of boys running over a palm-fringed shore.

   On cold mornings still in my pyjamas I crouched in front of the fire to read.  I loved the smell of the printed pages and as the fire grew an aroma of burning paper, wood and coal enveloped me and filled me with a tingling anticipation of the coming day.  I had a propelling pencil with a metal barrel so thin I could twist it in and out of shape.  I used it to write my name in all my books.  I got dressed in front of the fire while mam had a kettle boiling on the hob on a swivel.  I put on my sandals with their funny crepe soles with bits I could pull off with my fingers.  I wore my tomato-coloured tee-shirt and short grey trousers and white ankle socks.

   I always drank a glass of milk before I went out to play.  The glass was a funny shape, wide at the bottom and top and narrow in the middle.   It was ridged all over with a diamond pattern and when the milk was gone the diamonds were clouded all over.   I left it for mam to wash on the draining board with its runnels gouged to let water run into the sink.  Next to the sink was a brick boiler built in the corner for heating water on washing-day and bath-night.  The bricks were painted chocolate-brown against the dark-green walls and there was lino on the floor with the pattern worn away.

   I went out and through the passage into Bridgewater Terrace.  Obbo was playing football at the far end with Keith Flaherty. They were using a hard ball and they were both good kickers.  The ball thwacked onto the ground and the gravel spurted.  Keith lived with his grandma, just the two of them in the house. She was very old, with skin like wrinkled parchment, thin and bony and bent over.  She wore stained slippers and skirts down to her ankles.  She shuffled along with a stick, knobby and worn and with a brass end.  When she ran out of Woodbines she waved her stick in the air and shrieked “Keith, Keith,” in a broken croak till he came.

   “Go an get mi Woodies, ye lazy little bastard .Wher’ve, ye bin ’idin? ’Al larrop ye good an’ ’ard if ye don’t look sharp!”

   Keith wore the same dirty, torn raincoat, even in the middle of summer.  The belt was fastened and his boots were old and too big.  His nose was always running and he wiped it on his sleeve. There was a priest who came to see his grandma every week and he’d put his arm round Keith’s shoulder and told him to cheer up.

3

   I went through into Falmouth Place.  There was a girl I didn’t know skipping under a lamp-post.  She was wearing a thin, washed-out frock and she had black laceless runners on her feet.  As she skipped she counted breathlessly,”

   ’Undred an one, ’undred an two, ’undred an’ three.”  She stopped”

   “Is there just you?”

   “No, av gorra big sister.  She’s a seamstress at Sumrie’s.  Ye know she stitches seams in knickers are Pat does.”

   When she smiled her face lit up and the smile seemed to spread to the whole street and to me especially.

   “What do they call you?”

   “Margaret.  Margaret Hopwood”

   “My name’s Barry Tebb.

   “What school you go to?”

   “E1lerby, over the Hollows.”

   “Mi mam says she an’t  ’ad time to sort ’owt out yet.  I an’t gorra dad.”

   I didn’t know what to say.  I wondered if he’d died and she knew what I was thinking.

   “’E in’t dead or ’owt.  Mi mam and ’im split.  We live with mi gran now.  A’ve got mi little sister’s that’s two an’ are Ian’s seven.   I ’ave to look after em a lot.   Can you look after kids?”

   “I don’t know.’

   “I’ll learn ye-s’easy once ye know ’ow.  ’Ave an ’ankie ’andy to keep their faces clean. ’An watch young un for wettin’ ’erself.”

   Nobody had ever talked to me like that before and I felt quite grown up.  I asked her if she’d been on the Hollows.

   “No.  Alright you tek us then .Can ye do an ’andstand?  S’easy.”

   When she tucked her dress into her navy-blue knickers I went red.

   “What’s up?’ ’Ainchever seen a girl’s knickers? Y’are funny but yer a1right.Come on.  Watch!”

   She flipped her hands down on the path and her feet shot up onto the wall then she expertly came down again.

   “Learned that at mi old schoo1.  A were top at P.T. What you good at? A know, a bet its readin an’ doin’ compos. Ye wear specs so you’ve gorra be clever.  Its all that reading as meks ye near-sighted.  Come on, show us t’hollas.”

   I took her the long way round by the top ends of the streets.  I didn’t want to bump into Keith Flaherty and ’Obbo again and them wanting me to join in their football.  I showed Margaret the gates of the coal-yard all locked up for the weekend.

   “The horse and carts come down this road in the week.  You’ve to keep out a watch for them coming suddenly round the corner, specially with young kids in tow.  Over that fence is the goodsyard where coal-trains come in from Middleton Colliery.”

   “What’s colliery’?”

   “Coa1mine.You know, where they go down in cages to dig out coal.”

   “Allus knew ye were clever, knowin’ what long words mean an’ all.

   Still I bet I know stuff what you don’t!”

   “Come on, at this rate it’ll be dark before we get there!”

   We crossed over the cobbles in front of our house.  Dad was up on some steps washing windows but he didn’t see us.

   “What job’s yer dad do?”

   “He works in an office, he does accounts.”

   “What’s ‘accounts’?”

   “Sorting money out.  How much gets paid in and out every month.  He makes sure its all accounted for.”

   “Sounds right borin’.  What you. wanna be when ye grow up?   Do figures like yer dad’?”

   “No, I want to be a doctor or a professor, something like that.  Find out what’s wrong with people when they’re poorly and how to make them better.  I’m reading a book from the library about Lord Lister.  He lived in Leeds a hundred years ago, he was a doctor at the Infirmary.  He discovered you had to keep things clean to stop germs spreading and causing diseases.”

   Margaret’s mouth was open.

   “Yer like a walkin’ encyclopedia. ‘Ow d’ you remember it all? Ye must ‘ave a brain like a machine o’ summat.  Come on, show mi t’ hollas.”

   We went past Bayfords’  garage and Standish’s woodyard and waited while a green corporation bus rumbled past down South Accom There was a wall,  as broad as it was tall, dividing South Accom. from a narrow cobbled road that ran parallel a short way on the other side with a twelve foot drop.

   “Can you climb on top?”

   “No.”

   “Don’t cher like ’eights?”

   “No.”

   “A knew ye wouldn’t”

   She clambered up onto the wall and looked across the hollows. “So that’s t’ hollas’ S’big innit? That your school over’ top?”

   “Yes”

   “Don’t look owt much.  Where’s church?”

   “What church?”

   “Ye mean there in’t no church?”

   “No,”

   “Don’t you believe in God then?”

   “Yes”

   “See! Yer don’t know everything d’ye Mr. Cleverclogs!

   We went round the end of the grey railings that the wall gave way to and crossed the cobbled side-road onto the Hollows.

   “What ’appened to  t’ouses?”

   “They got pulled down for slum clearance before the war.”

   “‘Al bet they ‘ad rats from t’ river.  A saw a rat once in’t cellar.  A screamed mi ‘ead off.  It ‘ad great big whiskers and it’s tail were a mile long. A go goose-pimples all over just thinking on it.”

   She tried to jump up and see what was over the creosoted fence but it was too high.

   “What’s over t’ fence?”

   “Big drums with cables for electricity. You can see them if you look between the cracks.”

   We bent down and screwed up our eyes and our noses filled with the heavy smell of creosote and we could see the huge wooden reels with blue and green cables wound round them.  Some were faded because they had stood so long in the wind and the weather but others were new and shiny in the sun.

   “They’re like a giant’s cotton reels”

   “Aye but where’s giant?”

Margaret gave me a friendly push.

   “‘Ell’s bells.  What’s time?”

   “Quarter past twelve.”

   I was very proud of being able to tell the time and even prouder of my watch with Roman figures mam got me from Marks and Sparks for my birthday

“Blummin ’eckers.  Mi mam’ll bray mi if a don’t go to ’t chip oil for us dinner.  Where is it?  She told mi t’ ask.”

   “Just up that little hill over the road.”

   “Will ye tek us?”

   We climbed over the mounds of earth and broken bricks and crossed the road to where a broken-down wall bounded the Mansions, a terrace of dilapidated Victorian houses.  The families there didn’t have any money.  There were holes behind the front doors you had to jump over and they had rats the size of cats. The children wore torn jumpers and pushed broken prams piled with wood for fires.  They had impetigo and we used to cross the road so we didn’t have to speak.   I told Margaret about them and said it was better to go the long  way round by the Bridgefield along Cross Green Lane. When we got to the fish shop the queue was onto the path.

   “’Ell, we’ll be ’ere ’ours.  Keep mi place.  A’ve gorra tell mi mam dinner’ll be late.  A’ll be back in a tick.” I stood in the queue and Margaret ran off straight down the hill past the mansions.  She was back panting and red in five minutes.  I knew just how long it had taken because I watched the ‘centre-sweep second hand’ go all the way round five times.

   “I ‘ad to go anyroad. Mi mam and’t given mi any money.”

   By then we were inside the shop with it’s sizzling and crackling.  The assistant in her white coat was slapping fried fish into white paper and scooping chips into bags with scraps to order.

   “Three times and one chips wi’ scraps.”

   “Three and five, love.”

   Margaret laid a half-crown and a shilling on the marble counter six inches higher than her head and put the warm greasy packet into the wicker-basket she’d brought back with her.

   “Ye can come to dinner at are ’ouse.  Mi mam said t’ask ye.”

   I said, ”Thank you very much”, just like mam taught me and Margaret gave me an old-fashioned look and her hand touched mine like a bird alighting and flying off so fast you wondered if it had ever been there at all.

19

   One morning a telegram came for mam.  It was delivered with a loud rat-tat-tat at the door by a boy in a black uniform riding a bright scarlet motorbike.  He looked very important with his leather pouch strapped round his middle and when he’d handed the telegram to mam he set off again with a great roar.

   Mam looked worried.

   “Your gran’s been taken badly.  I’ll have to go up and help”.

   When I went to call for Margaret I told her about the telegram while her mam was listening.

   “Go an’ tell yer mam ye can stop ‘ere while she’s gone.” Margaret came round with me and mam said it was alright and to say thank you to Mrs. Hopwood.  I felt a kind of tingle in my neck. Whenever mam went up north it was a long job and it was the first day of the six weeks’ holiday.  Six weeks with Margaret, night and day.  I looked at her but she was looking away, pretending to go all shy but there was a gleam in her eye.

   By supper-time mam had gone off to the City Station and I was eating fish and chips with Margaret.  I’d never known them taste so good.  Her mam said,

   “You two needn’t think you’re keeping me awake all night with your stories.  I’ve put you together in the attic.  Just give yer face an’ ‘ands a quick wash and up yer go!”

   They had a gas geyser in the kitchen and Margaret turned it on.  The jets lit with a whoosh and she pointed the nozzle over a red plastic bowl in the sink.  She let me get washed first and said I could share her towel.

   The attic was like our’s except theirs wasn’t an end house so there was a skylight instead of a side window.  All we could see was the side of the chimney stack and the stars.  There was a tall dresser with drawers and a mirror with a crack in one corner and mottled all over.  There was a chair for our clothes and an oak wardrobe with doors kept shut with a wad of paper. The bed had a carved headboard and a counterpane in green and long white bolster.  It was on metal castors with a chamber-pot underneath.  I’d never undressed in front of a girl before.

   “Mi mam ‘ad no business mekkin us share, She thinks we’re not old enough to do ‘owt. Ye’d not try ‘owt on, a know ‘ow strict yer mam is”

   She suddenly went red.

   “Alright, yer needn’t turn round!”

   She pulled her frock over her head and took off her vest and pulled down her knickers.  Suddenly she was in a good mood again.

   “Alright, ye’ve seen everything now!”

   She laughed as she put on her white nightdress with a border of flowers round the collar.

   “I’ve never let anyone see me in the nude before. A never thought a’d dare but wi’ you its alright.”

   We climbed into bed. The sheets were cool and white in the hot July night.  I turned and looked into Margaret’s face.  Her skin was pale and seemed to glow in the near darkness.

   “Alright, you can give me a good-night, kiss, just one!”

   I fell into deep, dreamless sleep in Margaret’s arms, then woke up because the cats were yowling in the binyard and someone was shouting to quiet them.  Margaret, too, had woken. She whispered,

   “Do you know what they do in bed? You know what I mean?”

   “The man puts it inside the woman.” I said, remembering how Margaret had explained ‘the facts of life’. 

   “Swear you’ll never tell!”

   I swore and touched her where she put my hand.

   “One day we’ll get married and do it for real.”

20

   It was Saturday and we were going to the matinee at the Princess.  Nancy, who lived farther down Margaret’s street, came with us.   She was in the same class as Margaret at St. Hilda’s.  She wasn’t as pretty as Margaret, not by a long chalk.  Her cheeks were too red and she knew it.  Margaret said that Nancy ‘knew a lot more for her age than she should.’ When we played in her house when her mam and dad were out, she pushed some paper up her you-know-what.  She said she’d let you watch if you wanted!”

   We went up the hill to Mr. Moss’s shop and bought penny ice lollies.  We had a race to see who could suck the colour out quickest.  Nancy won and her cheeks were redder than ever.  Obbo came part of the way with us, going for his mam’s shopping at the Maypole.

   When we turned onto the street with the ginnel we met Brian Fox, who used to live in Falmouth Terrace.  Brian was big and liked to show off to strangers.  He gave Obbo a hard look.

   “Is this kid’d moved t’are ‘ouse?”

   I told him no but he kept on.

   “Y sure?”

   “Shurrup goin’ on, ye daft bugger.” Margaret said, “Go look fo’ yessen. Yer mam’s old curtains are still up at winders and t’ouse is empty.”

   Brian calmed down.

   “Orl right but when it gets let mek sure ye let us know.”

   When we got to the Princess the queue down the side was nearly all in.

   Margaret bagged two seats together for us but Nancy had to sit on the front row, right up against the screen.

   It was very noisy with shouting and stamping before the film started and lollipop sticks were flicking and there was a lot of pushing and shoving in the ice cream queue.  Dick, the commissionaire with a beer-belly bursting his buttons, kept yelling “Quiet!” and sprayed the front rows with disinfectant to show he meant business.

   An episode of ‘The Little Rascals’ was on first then a Gene Autry film and I kept my arm round Margaret all the way through.  When we came out the sun made us blink and we couldn’t find Nancy so we set off home without her but she soon caught us up.  On Lavender Walk we saw a drunk man staggering from side to side.  I started to laugh but Margaret said to shush.

   “Poor man,” she said and gave me such a look I shut up and said I was sorry.

   “T’int your fault.  Ye just don’t know owt about life.  Ye’ll 1earn!”

   While we were crossing over the Hollows Nancy whispered something to Margaret.  Margaret went red but Nancy kept on and finally she asked if I knew what V.D. was.  I’d read some medical encyclopaedias with their diagrams of mens’ and womens’ sexual parts and what could go wrong with them but my ideas were still hazy.

   “When you get these diseases...sometimes you get a burning feeling when you wee that is, I think that’s a bit of it.”

   They stood open-mouthed.

   “‘Ow d’you know all that?”

   “I read it in a book.”

   “‘Ell’s bells, there in’t nowt like that in’t books I’ve read”

   “And there’s another bit about getting sores and things…”

   “Where d’ye mean asked Nancy asked eagerly.

   “I’m not sure…exactly.  I think its, its…” I spluttered and went red.  Margaret said to whisper it to her.

   “On a woman’s...where you wee from”.

   It was Margaret’s turn to go scarlet but she dutifully passed the whisper on to Nancy.

Nancy burst out

   “I know a new rhyme!”

   She made sure there was no-one around and started to chant:

  Milk, milk, lemonade

   Round the corner

  Chocolate spread.

   As she chanted she touched herself, one hand on each breast, then both together on her crotch and then one hand on her bum.  Margaret joined in, whirling and twirling round.  Then she started to giggle and couldn’t stop and collapsed on a mound of earth and bricks. She gathered herself together and pretended to look for four-leaf clover

   While we were having tea she kept spluttering and giggling but her mam didn’t inquire and just told her to make sure she didn’t choke herself to death.  She knew more about kids and their secrets than anyone.  Most mams never seemed to have been kids, especially mine, but Margaret’s mam had an ‘I-know-what’s going-on’ smile and she was smiling it when Margaret was spluttering over her tea.

   After we’d finished eating Mrs. Gardiner called Margaret over.  She said something I couldn’t hear and gave her some money.

   “I ‘ave to do an errand fo’ mi mam. Ye can come.”

   When we got to the bridge I asked where we were going.  She put her face close to me.

   “I’ve to get some Dr. White’s fo’ mi mam!”

   When we got to the shop on the corner of Albert Road she told me to wait outside.

   “A just couldn’t ask for ‘em wi’ you standin’, a just couldn’t!”

   On the way home we sat on the wall near the bridge where there was nobody about and she told me about the mysteries of womens’ periods, “But don’t ye let on ye know owt!” she laughed as we crossed the gravelled forecourt in front of the goodsyard, “Yer mam wun’t want yer to know.”  I knew she wouldn’t but I felt very glad that Margaret had told me.

   When we’d left the brown paper parcel at her mam’s went to play on the Hollows.   Paul Green said he had a secret.

   “There’s this Marlene from the ‘Mansions’.  She says she let me put it up her to-night.”

   “Gerron,” Margaret said, “she’s only seven!”

   “You just wait!” Paul laughed.  He was twelve but very big for his age.  He never hit anyone unless they hit him first and nobody was that daft.

   “Look, a tol’ ye, she’s cummin!”

   A small girl came through a hole in the wall that bounded the Mansions. She wore a torn dress and pulled a bedraggled doll by its leg.  When she got near her eyes seemed fixed on nowhere and when you looked at her all you got was a blank stare.  Her arms hung by her sides and when she walked her movements were jerky and her whole body seemed pale and listless.

   Paul ignored her and said to play hide n’ seek so we did but when Margaret found me and Nancy called ‘all-in’ there was no Paul and no Marlene.  Then I saw him coming from behind a big mound of earth with Marlene just behind.  He looked very full of himself and she had her head down.  Margaret gave me a look and we knew something had been going on.

   Paul was very triumphant.

   “Ye see!  I put it up her.  Ask her if you don’t believe me!” Marlene bent her head in silent acquiescence.

42

   Margaret and I had Christine’s room while she was away.  It was very small but there were bunk beds.  From the start I could see mam wasn’t too keen on the idea but Auntie Edna said there just wasn’t anywhere else and that we were ‘just bairns’. Mam still made me go to the bathroom to change into my pyjamas while Margaret was putting on her nightie.  Mam came in ‘just to say good-night’ once we were in bed and she went out looking cross.

   We lay and listened to the talk going on in the living room about what kinds of flowers to plant and what new kinds of floor covering they were and it was all very boring but it didn’t go on for long because Uncle Bill was on early and had to be up at five.

   When the lights were out and the house was silent we started to whisper. We were next to the bathroom, opposite to Auntie Edna and Uncle Bill.  Mam n’ dad’s room was away on the other side, through the living room.  Without saying a word Margaret slipped her legs over the edge of the top bunk and crept in next to me.

   “Ye knew them jokes ye couldn’t get, ye mam called ‘em “blue jokes”, she meant they were mucky, ye know about what men and women do in bed ye know!”

   We snuggled together in the close dark, hiding behind the dunes of the pillows and love caught us in ripples and rode us to its shore. She led me from the bud of her breasts to the tide of her thighs.   I felt tight and excited and my thing went stiff and spurted and I felt like I never had before and she said

   “Ye gie mi a wet tummy, it feels lovely!”

   and she held me close and kissed me and sighed,

   “That’s ow babies come.  Well nearly, anyroad!”

   We must have fallen asleep but when I woke up next morning Margaret was back in the top bunk because she didn’t trust my mam, not one little bit.

43

   When we got back home there was a letter from the corporation saying we could have a house at Tinshill and we moved to the new estate.  Airey semis with prefabricated pebble-dash slats, built-in kitchen units and made-to-measure gardens.  Every Saturday I went back to the streets, dinner at Auntie Nellie’s then the matinee at the Princess with Margaret. Everybody was on the move, to the new estates or death.  A Readymix cement works bruised the Hollows, Ellerby Lane School closed, St. Hilda’s bulldozed.  The buses ran empty, the route closed.  One Saturday Margaret’s family had moved and no-one knew where.

   Falling into Eden was just a beginning, Falmouth Street full of children playing, Margaret’s mauve blazer, her hair over her shoulders, the Bridge over the Aire. Margaret, are you listening? Are your eyes still dreaming? Can you hear my voice in Eden?

“I am here, I am waiting”