War Babies by Annie Murray Page B

up.
    ‘D’you like your job?’ she asked.
    ‘Yeah. It’s OK. I have to start early – it’s hard to get up.’
    ‘Why d’you want to go – to war?’
    ‘I dunno.’ Danny stared ahead of him. ‘It’d be different from here. Seems like you’d go places. It wouldn’t be boring.’
    ‘How d’you know? It might be.’
    ‘Yeah. I s’pose. But it’d be a different sort of boring.’ He turned a sudden grin on her.
    Rachel laughed. ‘I s’pose that’s one way of looking at it! Now you say it I wish I could go too.’
    They quickly finished the food and threw the paper away.
    ‘Can I walk home with you?’ Danny asked.
    Rachel was completely taken aback. ‘What, you – with me?’
    He shrugged. ‘Yeah.’
    ‘But it’s miles, Danny!’ Gladys’s house was in Aston – across the other side of town. She knew she ought to catch the bus: she was already going to be much later
home than her mother was expecting. But if she could walk with Danny . . .
    ‘Doesn’t matter. It’s only a few miles out my way. I’ve got nothing else to do.’
    This last comment was a bit of a dampener, but she tried not to mind. ‘You’re a case, Danny, you are,’ she said. But she knew she was blushing. She and Danny could walk
together all that way!
    They set off in the balmy evening, along Digbeth, out of town.
    ‘This is where we used to live,’ she said, leading him into Floodgate Street. She showed him the house in the shadow of the railway arch.
    ‘You lived here?’ Danny looked up at the great blue span of the bridge and down at the scruffy little house. He seemed surprised.
    ‘We did. Not any more. Mom always wanted to get out of here to somewhere better.’ She thought bitterly of Fred Horton but she didn’t say anything.
    ‘It’s just like where we lived,’ Danny said. He seemed reassured somehow. ‘Before our mom passed on, I mean. And it’s a bit like Auntie’s. We live on a yard
– off of Alma Street.’
    He sounded very young when he said that. For a moment Rachel felt like taking his hand but she thought better of it. They wound their way through Deritend, across to the Coventry Road.
    ‘D’you remember your mom?’ she asked. ‘I can only remember my dad a bit – I was very young when he passed on.’
Passed on
. The silence of shame clung
to her father’s death, but it seemed so remote from her that she scarcely ever thought of it. Peggy never mentioned him.
    ‘Course I can remember,’ Danny said, so fiercely that Rachel was taken aback. ‘She was the best, our mom. I’d never forget her.’
    ‘What was she like?’ she asked, encouraged that he seemed so keen to talk.
    ‘Well, she was – you know – a proper mom. Nice and kind. It was the old man who spoiled everything. He always did, the drunken sod.’
    Rachel remembered the frightening man who had dragged Danny away all those years ago.
    ‘Have you seen him? Since you came back, I mean?’
    ‘No,’ Danny almost shouted. ‘And I don’t want to! I’ll kill ’im if I set eyes on ’im – I swear to God I’ll finish ’im off!’
    ‘I don’t blame you,’ she said gently.
    ‘Don’t you?’ He gave her a sharp look.
    She returned his gaze, steadily. ‘No. I don’t.’
    He made a sound of annoyance. ‘What would you know, any road?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ she said carefully. ‘But I don’t blame you, that’s all.’
    There in the street, on some dusty bit of the Coventry Road, he stopped abruptly and turned to her.
    ‘I want to show you summat.’ His hand was gripping the thing in his pocket, whatever it was, and he seemed unsure whether to bring it out.
    ‘What?’ she said, trying to sound encouraging.
    Danny hesitated for a moment, his eyes wide, searching her face as if to be sure of something.
    ‘Come over ’ere.’
    They were at the corner of a road with rows of houses. Leaning up against the low wall, Danny pulled from his pocket a cheap little notebook with a worn, dark green cover. The spine of