We Passengers

Chapter 5

Although I wouldn't have thought it possible, I must have dozed off for a few minutes and I dreamed of the little girls on the platform although, in my dream, it was me and Nancy. In that funny way that dreams have, we were standing on the little train platform but also in the back street behind our house in Bethnal Green and, the evacuee children from the train became the children we used to play with. I recognised Peggy Matthews from across the street - thick as thieves we were once - and little Bobby Irwin who died of the polio when he was just nine and I wanted to reach out to them, to keep them close but for every step I took toward them, it seemed that they retreated another five. Like most people, I never really appreciated my childhood; always too eager to grow up and make my own way in the world and I sometimes wish I could go back and, this time, savour every moment. It was a simple time and a happy one for the most part. Days spent in the classroom at Hallsville School in Canning Town, trudging back home in all weathers. I remember one day we had a big storm, about seven or eight I must have been. All the way through that long walk it was like the wind didn't want me to get home, driving me backwards for every step that I took and then, all of a sudden, as I turned into our back street, it was behind me and I was suddenly being propelled down the narrow back street faster than my feet could keep up with. Afterwards, Mum said it was like she just had a feeling, like she does sometimes, and so she'd come out into the back street and caught me as I was about to fly past our back yard.

'Fast as you were going, you might have ended up in Hong Kong if I hadn't been there,’ she used to tell me after and I used to giggle at the thought. Course, none of us had ever been to Hong Kong - or anywhere else for that matter. Foreign travel was for royalty and film stars, not for the likes of us. Not, that is, until the men started going off to France and Germany. It was around the time of the big storm that Dad vanished. It was a Tuesday and I was starting on dinner as that was Mum's late day at the factory. As usual, she got home about six and her face tightened when she saw that Dad wasn't home yet - she always hated leaving me to make dinner and look after Nancy but it was usually only about an hour between us getting home from school and Dad getting home so we muddled along.

'Wasting his wages in the pub again, no doubt,’ Mum said as she pulled her factory tabard over her head and put on an apron, ‘Like there isn't little enough to go round as it is.’ That night, I ate my dinner quickly; Mum's lips were getting thinner and thinner with every minute that passed and I wanted to be finished and up in the room me and Nancy shared before he got home stinking of beer and the inevitable row would start. It didn't surprise me especially that he wasn't home by bedtime - Mum always insisted that I was in bed by nine on a school night and I knew that pubs closed much later than that. It was the following morning when I came downstairs to put the tea on and found Mum sitting at the kitchen table, still in the clothes she'd been wearing the night before that I knew that things were different this time. When I got home from school that day, I could see that Mum hadn't gone to work as I found her in the kitchen with the policeman with the bright red hair who kept writing things down in his little pad and told us that he'd “keep an eye out” for Dad. He seemed nice enough, that policeman, and I believed him when he said that but, whether he did it or not, it didn't do any good as we never saw Dad again.