London Pride by Beryl Kingston Page A

I’ll fetch a broom to it. Vile thing.’
    â€˜Does it mean one of us is going to die?’ Baby persisted.
    â€˜No it don’t,’ Mum said. ‘Look sharp inside all of you. We got a pie to bake.’
    Fortunately they were soon very busy preparing the supper and making sandwiches for their dinner because it was too late to fry anything and they were all extremely hungry. And then the rain came torrenting down and not long after that Dad arrived home sopping wet and had to be skinned out of his finery and wrapped in two bath towels and sat by the stove with his feet in a mustard bath until he stopped shivering. So they soon forgot their unwanted visitor and none of them had any cause to remember it until three days later.
    Dad had been on guard duty all afternoon, and after his supper he’d changed his clothes and gone whistling off to the Club as usual, leaving his womenfolk to a quiet evening. There was nothing remarkable about it, Mum tackled the mending, Joan darned her socks, and Peggy helped Baby to stick the latest cuttings in her album. They were making a collection of all the newspaper pictures of the opening of County Hall, especially those that showed the State Coach, with their father’s diminutive figure beside it ringed in red crayon and labelled OUR DAD in letters taller than he was.
    They went to bed a little later than usual because it was Friday and they didn’t have to get up for school in the morning. Baby slept at once and her sisters didn’t talk for long. They were sleepy and easy, listening to the familiar sounds of the house, the stairs creaking as they cooled, the tick of the tin clock on their mantelpiece, Mum downstairs lighting the gaslight beside the stove and moving her chair so that she could sit beneath it and finish her mending, sleepy and easy, oh very very sleepy. So when somebody knocked at the door the sudden, unexpected sound made them jump awake with alarm.
    It was Uncle Charlie. They knew at once from the burring sound of his voice and the strong smell of snuff that was rising to them from the hall. And he was worried about something. He was speaking in such a low hesitant way and Mum’s reply was like a startled bark.
    Peggy was filled with a terrible sense of foreboding, as if an icy wind had blown straight into her body and locked there. ‘It’s Dad,’ she whispered. ‘There’s something up with Dad.’
    â€˜Shush!’ Joan said fiercely, straining her ears to hear what was being said. Uncle Charlie’s voice had stopped and now his wife was speaking, not in her usual stern voice but as though she was patting somebody with her words. And Mum was wailing, ‘Oh my dear good God! What shall I do? What shall I do?’
    â€˜I know it’s Dad,’ Peggy said again. ‘Did we oughter go down?’
    There was movement in the hall, doors being opened and shut, feet scuffling, a renewed smell of snuff. And then the front door was opened again and closed quietly and the house was suddenly still. Both girls skimmed from the bed to the window to see who had left. It was Mum and Uncle Charlie and they were heading towards the Green. They were both walking very quickly and Mum had one hand at her throat as if she was trying to strangle herself.
    â€˜Shall we go down?’ Peggy whispered.
    â€˜No,’ Joan whispered back. ‘Let’s wait till Mum gets back.’
    It was a long vigil, hours and hours of it. They stood by the window and watched until they were shivering with cold, and they crept back to bed and cuddled together for warmth and comfort, and dozed and woke and dozed again, to hear the clock striking once, twice, three times, and the light was still on in the hall and Mum still hadn’t come home.
    But at last, when the sky was definitely getting lighter, they heard the scrape of a key in the lock and sat up achingly to listen. It
was
Mum. They were sure of that, because Aunty Connie