Just One More Day Read online

‘I don’t know,’ I tell him.

  He looks at me with his big blue eyes and I think he’s going to cry.

  ‘Daddy’ll be home soon,’ Mrs Williams tells him. We like Mrs Williams. She’s Mum’s best friend, they even went to school together, and when I grow up I’m going to talk over the fence to my best-friend neighbour while hanging washing on the line, the way Mrs Williams and Mummy do.

  Gary looks up at her. He’s got freckles too, huge great big ones like cornflakes, and crew-cut hair the same colour. Everyone loves him, Mummy especially. I know he’s her favourite, but I don’t mind – he’s my favourite too, when he’s not getting on my nerves.

  Mrs Williams gives me a glass of milk and a strawberry-jam sandwich which I take to the kitchen table to eat, while watching her wipe the dishes, making everything shine and clink as she puts them away. When I’m old enough I’m going to marry Geoffrey Williams, who’s the same age as me, but in a different class at school, and who always dawdles home. We’ll go courting, like my older cousins do, and I’ll take a long umbrella with a crook handle to the pictures when it rains.

  When Geoffrey comes in his mother tells him off for not even saying hello to me which I mind about quite a lot, but don’t say anything. Gary and I watch as he shouts back at her, and stomps off upstairs. If we ever spoke to our mum like that we’d be put in a home, or get the hiding of our lives. Mrs Williams looks upset. She stoops down to give Gary a hug and tickles my face with the end of one plait.

  After that we do a jigsaw, but Gary gets it all wrong, because he’s too young and his fingers are clumsy. He tries to look important though, by resting his chin in his hands and waggling his feet, the way I do, when I’m studying where to put the next piece.

  ‘Daddy’s here,’ Mrs Williams eventually calls out from the kitchen. By then Gary and I are huddled in one of the armchairs watching Blue Peter on the telly, which he doesn’t understand, and I don’t like. I’m feeling grumpy now because Daddy’s taken longer to come home than I expected, and Geoffrey’s still upstairs in his bedroom, avoiding me.

  Gary springs up and charges outside.

  ‘Aren’t you going too?’ Mrs Williams asks me.

  ‘I want to see the end of this,’ I tell her.

  I stay where I am, feeling angry with Daddy. Mrs Williams goes outside to talk to him over the fence, then Geoffrey comes down and sneers at the puzzle that I didn’t manage to finish.

  ‘This piece goes there,’ he snottily informs me, pressing it into place.

  ‘No it doesn’t!’ I cry.

  ‘Yes it does. Look!’

  I leap to my feet. ‘It’s a stupid puzzle anyway,’ I shout.

  ‘It’s you who’s stupid,’ he calls after me.

  ‘You won’t say that after I’ve smashed your head in.’

  ‘You and whose army?’

  Anyway, I’m going to marry a smuggler when I grow up.

  Later on, I’m standing in the doorway of our dining room watching Daddy giving Gary a cuddle. They’re in one of the big brown armchairs either side of the fireplace, but it’s not cold enough for the fire to be lit. Gary, like the baby he is, is crying for Mummy, but I’m still being brave. Anyway, I don’t care that Mummy’s not coming home, because I don’t care about anything. I just stand and watch and think how stupid everyone is.

  Daddy’s face is handsome and pale and his hair is fair. His blue eyes always twinkle, and crinkle at the corners when he laughs. He’s not quite as tall as Mummy, and he doesn’t have a bad temper either, but it’s still frightening when Mummy threatens to tell him if I’ve been naughty. I don’t think he’s ever smacked me though, not like Mummy, whose hand really stings my legs when she lets go. I don’t like Mummy tonight. I don’t like her at all.

  ‘Want a cuddle too?’ Daddy offers, holding out a hand to invite me onto his other knee.

  I want to, but I shake my head and say, ‘No. I’ve got to go and give Mandy and Bonnie their supper.’ Mandy and Bonnie are my two favourite dolls, along with Teddy who I’ve had since I was a baby.

  My bedroom is the prettiest of anyone’s in the street. It has a pink padded headboard with flowers all over it, and the curtains round the dressing table match those at the window and the seat of the stool. I’ve got quite a big wardrobe for all my clothes, a fold-up doll’s pushchair and cot, and a bright orange record player that I have to wind up. It doesn’t play grown-up records like the one downstairs, only the nursery-rhyme children’s kind, but that’s all right, Mandy and Bonnie prefer them anyway.

  My Bonnie lies over the ocean,

  My Bonnie lies over the sea,

  My Bonnie lies over the ocean,

  Oh bring back my Bonnie to me.

  I stand watching the record go round and round, then suddenly I snatch the needle off. I don’t want to listen to it any more. Not that one, so I put ‘Bobby Shaftoe’ on instead. Daddy sings that song sometimes, or ‘Row, Row, Row the Boat’, or silly songs that he makes up the words to. Because he’s Welsh he’s got a lovely voice. Not like Mummy and me, but I still want to be in the school choir one day. I’m quite good at ballet though, and I’m learning to play the piano. Daddy’s probably going to call me downstairs soon to come and practise my scales. He might have forgotten though, and I won’t remind him, even though it’ll make Mummy cross if she finds out, because she’s always saying that I have to practise every day – and ballet too.

  Three weeks ago I started going to elocution classes. They’re really embarrassing. The teacher talks all posh, and I feel really stupid saying things like How now brown cow the way the Queen does. Last week I saw Mummy, out of the corner of my eye, trying not to laugh, and in the end we had to leave because we couldn’t stop laughing.

  But that wouldn’t be the end of it, Mummy warned me as we ran home through the rain. ‘You’re going to learn to talk proper, my girl, and make a real lady out of yourself.’

  There was some talk, a while ago, about me going to a school over by the Downs, which is the really posh part of Bristol, where everyone lives in big houses and has servants, and all the snooty kids wear silly uniforms and ride horses at weekends. I hate horses and I’d rather die than go to one of those schools because I’d miss all my friends and get teased even more, which I told Mummy, furiously, stamping my feet and clenching my fists. I got sent straight to my room, and wasn’t allowed to come out again until I could mind my manners. Fortunately no more’s been said about it since, so I think she listened to me.

  Taking off my glasses, which isn’t allowed, I put my nurse’s uniform on over my dress, then I hook the heartbeat listener around my neck to check on Mandy, who’s been a bit off colour lately. She’s lying on the bed with Bonnie and Teddy, propped up by a cushion. I’m probably a bit old for Teddy now, but I let him sleep with us still because I know what it’s like to be afraid in the night. When I get like that I usually creep in with Mummy and Daddy, so it’s only right that Teddy has someone to make him feel better too.

  Mandy is still looking peaky. ‘You’ve got to get better,’ I tell her crossly. ‘I don’t want you always being ill.’

  ‘Bobby Shaftoe’ finishes so I go to wind up the record player again. When it’s ready I decide I don’t want to be here any more, so I tear off my nurse’s uniform and run down the stairs, shouting to Daddy, ‘Can I go out to play?’

  ‘Five minutes,’ he calls back. His head pops round the kitchen door. ‘Don’t I get a kiss?’

  I want to say no, but it might hurt his feelings, so I go and kiss him, then skip back down the passage to the front door.

  ‘Beans on toast for tea,’ he calls after me.

  ‘Yeah!’ Gary cheers.

  I stop and turn round. ‘It’s Wednesday,’ I remind Daddy. ‘We have corned-beef mash on Wednesdays.’

  He puts down the knife he’s holding and comes to lift me up in his arms. I don’t want to let him, but I don’t stop him either. ‘How was school today?’ he says, rubbing his stubbly chin over my face.

&n
bsp; I want to ask when Mummy’s coming home, but that might not be brave, so instead I put my head on his shoulder and my arms round his neck. ‘It was all right,’ I say.

  He gives me a squeeze and kisses the top of my head. ‘It won’t be long,’ he tells me.

  My head comes up. ‘Tomorrow?’ I say eagerly.

  He laughs. ‘I hope before that.’

  I’m just starting to get excited when I realise he’s talking about tea, not Mummy, so I wriggle down and go off outside to play.

  Chapter Two

  Eddress

  This is me taking me wedding vows to Eddie, back in ’53, at the ripe old age of twenty-one. ‘I, Eddress Betty Price, do take thee, Edward William Lewis, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love, cherish and to obey, till death us do part . . .’

  Eddie and Ed get wed, our Gord joked at the time. He’s the brother who gave me away. Our dad couldn’t do it, because he went and died back in ’47. Deaf as a coot, he was, so he never spoke much. Just sat in the corner of the kitchen reading his paper, or pottered about his allotment where he grew the flowers he sent us kids out round doors selling on Wednesdays to make a few extra bob to tide us over till he got paid on Thursday. He was a clean man, always took his bath in front of the fire on Fridays, and had a good wash and shave every morning before he went off to work on the buildings. His funeral shouldn’t have been anything to laugh at, but it was, on account of just about everything going wrong, from the horse bolting off with the coffin on the way to the church, to trying to drop the bloody thing in the wrong hole. Even our mam was splitting her sides in the end, and none of us have ever had the nerve to show our faces in the church since – till the day Eddie and I got wed.

  I’m no beauty, but I was a radiant bride, they said, surrounded by me brothers (we might have been less of a spectacle if three of ’em hadn’t been in plaster casts thanks to a fight they got into on Eddie’s stag night. Thank God Eddie was already passed out drunk by then. He never could take his drink, but his mam had told me he was a champion fighter as a boy, working down the mines, so if he’d been conscious who knows what part of him might have been strapped up for the big day). As it was, he had on a smart black pinstriped suit, a red tie and starched white shirt. Very handsome, even if he is an inch and a half shorter than me. And I had on a beautiful white lace dress, with a long white veil and the biggest bouquet of flowers any of us had ever seen. Cost our mam a fortune, it all did, but she was as proud as Punch when our picture was in the local paper after, saying how much I resembled our lovely young Queen when she’d got married, the same year as our dad popped his clogs.

  It has to be said Eddie was a bit out of his league with our family. There’s a lot more of us, you see, and our edges are a lot rougher than his. Not that his family’s any better, mind, it’s just Eddie himself who’s different. He’s, how can I put it? more gentlemanly than most. He hardly ever swears, or shouts. He don’t get drunk on Fridays and then throw up after being chucked out of the pub. He’s not all that keen on drink really. He prefers politics and poetry, and bleeding philosophy, I’ll have you know. And he loves to draw, which delights the kids no end, and being Welsh – though he don’t have much of an accent – he can sing. The best thing about him though is that he worships the ground I walk on, even though I’m bossy, loud, not interested in hardly anything that interests him, and, well, if the truth be told, a bit common I suppose, though you better never let me catch anyone else saying that, or they’ll be more than sorry. No, he really thinks I’m the bee’s knees. Course I’ve got a lot of feelings for him too, I just don’t go round talking about it all the time, never could abide all that lovey-dovey stuff. He drives me mad though, I can tell you that, with his head always stuck in some book, and the way he blathers on about Marx or bleeding Lenin. He’s a bit of a Commie, you see, which is all right I suppose, just as long as it don’t stop him bringing home a wage at the end of the week.

  You could say he’s a bit of an old brainbox in his way, but he’s a good laugh when we go out with my brothers and their wives on a Saturday night. He’s a good dancer too, and he never carries on about me going to bingo with our mam whenever I want. He works as a cutter-grinder at an engineering factory in Fishponds, where he earns about fourteen guineas a week before overtime, and he goes up Soundwell Technical College every Tuesday night where he’s studying to become a draughtsman.

  My first job after leaving school was down the pottery, but after a couple of years I went out the British Aircraft Corporation, which was where me and Eddie met, because he was working there then. Since we had our Susan I haven’t worked, and now we’ve got Gary too, a nice three-bedroomed semi-detached council house in a cul-de-sac right on the edge of Kingswood, which is in Bristol, and a garden big enough for the kids to play cricket at the front, and for Eddie to grow vegetables at the back. Eddie’s proper soft on those kids, he is, lets them get away with blue murder, so it’s left to me to stop them running riot. They’re not bad though, except I reckon our Susan would be a bit of a handful if I allowed it. Has a mind of her own, does that one. She’s like me, I suppose, strong-willed, outspoken and doesn’t always think before she speaks. Her teachers tell me she’s doing well at school though – Eddie and I always keep a check – and she’s already won two awards for ballet. I don’t think she likes the piano much, but she’ll thank me later if I make her keep it up. As for the elocution lessons, well, she’ll thank me for those too, one of these days, if we can stop laughing long enough for her to make some progress. Eddie has to take her now, because I can’t keep a straight face with all that how-now-brown-cowing, nor can he, half the time, but he’s better at covering it up than I am.

  As for Gary, he’s the apple of my eye. I always wanted a boy, and now I’ve got one. He’s going to grow up to be just like his dad. He might even be a writer. Eddie would like that, as he wants to be a writer himself. He’s had a couple of things turned down by a publisher though, which hasn’t done his confidence much good. I tell him to keep at it, because not everyone makes it straight away, and I like reading what he writes. It makes me feel proud of him. No-one else I know has got a husband who can write – half the silly buggers can’t even read!

  He hasn’t written much lately, which I have to admit I’m relieved about, because I haven’t much been in the mood to read it. I’ve got a lot on me mind, you see, what with our mam’s legs playing her up so she can’t get around as well as she used to, and now this business with me. I wish I’d never watched that bloody documentary, because that’s where it all started. Right as rain I was, then they go and put something like that on the telly, telling us all to check ourselves for lumps and things, and this is where I end up – in bloody hospital having an operation. They shouldn’t be allowed to put that sort of rubbish on telly, should they, it just frightens people. Why can’t they just leave well alone? I’ve got two children at home who need me, so I shouldn’t be wasting my time hanging round here having things done to me that would never have had to be done if I hadn’t watched that bleeding programme. That lump had been there for ages, not causing any harm, and I swear if I hadn’t said anything, it would have gone away on its own. Bit bloody late for that now though, innit? Bit bloody late indeed.

  I’ve just left the ward, on me own two feet (the rest of them in there look like they’ll be going out in a box), and now I’m walking down the hospital corridor with Eddie on our way out to the car. He’s smiling at everyone as we pass, because he’s that sort of bloke, but I’m ignoring them, because I don’t feel like being nice to anyone. I know that’s not very noble and brave of me, but you try having your bosom cut off and see how you bloody feel. I didn’t even say cheerio to the nurse who offered us a wheelchair. I felt like telling her what to do with the bloody thing. I mean, what the hell do I need a wheelchair for – it wasn’t my sodding leg they amputated, was it? Oh no, it was my right bosom along with all the other
things around that part of me body, so I’ve got no more need of a wheelchair than I have for a brassiere with two cups now. Silly cow.

  Honest to God, you’d never believe it was May. We walk out the door and nearly get blowed straight off our feet. It’s like bloody winter. Low grey skies, drizzle in the air and a wind to slice the skin right off your bones. Good job Eddie thought to bring my big coat. It’s just draped round me shoulders because I can’t get my right arm in, but it’s better than nowt.

  ‘It’s bloody cold,’ I grumble, as he opens the passenger door of our old Morris for me to get in.

  ‘It’s supposed to brighten up tomorrow,’ he assures me.

  I don’t really care about the cold, I’m just glad to be going home. First though, I have to get in the car, and after me operation it’s not very easy to move. Me legs are all right, it’s me arm and that. I can see Eddie’s not sure how to help me, and I’m not sure how he can either, so I just plonk me bum down then bring me legs in one after the other. It annoys me that he didn’t help, even though I know he couldn’t.

  He gets in the driver’s seat, turns the ignition key then pushes the starter. The engine coughs like our mam’s dirty old lodger, then catches.

  ‘That’s a bloody relief,’ I comment, knowing Eddie was afraid too that it would let us down, because nine times out of ten it does.

  ‘Shouldn’t take long to get home,’ he says, steering us out of the car park onto the main road. The little orange arm flicks out after a while for us to turn right. Susan’s always tickled by those arms. I’m not sure why, but her laughing makes the rest of us laugh too.

  ‘So,’ I say, as we chug along towards Old Market, ‘what did Michaels have to say for himself?’ I don’t talk to the doctor meself, you see. All that medical malarkey gets on my nerves, especially when I don’t understand what the bloody hell he’s talking about half the time.

  ‘He says,’ Eddie replies, giving a quick glance over as I unclip the top of my handbag to take out me fags and matches (Embassy tipped, if you’re interested, and Swan Vestas), ‘that you have to give up smoking.’