All I know is every working boy in Richmond is waiting and watching. Half afraid war’ll happen, half afraid it won’t.”
She sits beside me and slides an arm around my shoulders and she’s warm and she’s Connie and I’d like to sit there forever being held like when I was little but I know I’d blub so instead I say it’s nothing.
“Sometimes, […] when I see a tower in the distance, I half expect to see a plane fly into it.”
I have struggled through an entire packet of cream biscuits I didn’t like when I could have had cake. Sacrifice, without any reason or benefit. Ife is too short for cream biscuits. I could be trapped in a collapsing skyscraper tomorrow and it would have all been a tragic waste of calories.
They cannot keep the anger in, the women: they drink too much, they shoplift, they sleep with their doubles partners, they scream at their children, the pay someone to take a knife to their eyes or breast or stomach. The turn the anger inward and develop a depression so deep they cannot get out of bed.
Maybe lightning isn’t the best analogy for love. Maybe love is more like a coin: moving between people all around us, all the time, linking people within families and on the other side of the world, across oceans.
I can imagine [Mrs. Husting’s] face close to the keyhole. She’s been pacing up and down the hall for the best part of ten minutes. She’s imagining what she might be disturbing. She is unsure how to mother a grown man.
“A girl photographer.” [Francis] raises his arms and pulls on the clothesline, which explains its condition. “That’s stupid.”
Although even then, Mum says, Kip will never make anything of himself, (“that’s plain”), and if we have to send boys to fight overseas—here she gives me a nervous glance—“it’s layabout boys with no responsibilities, the Kip Westaways of the world, who ought to be going.”
I remember as a child spending ages every morning choosing which shoes I would wear and then worrying all day about the poor ones left behind in the cupboard, about how dejected they must feel having been passed over. Forsaken.
“It’s not easy, raising children. It’s an enormous commitment. The most important job in the world.”
[Craig] rolls his eyes. “It’s not curing smallpox. It means you’ve fucked someone.”
It’d be different if Stanzi was pregnant. Stanzi’s going places. She has a degree. That dingy little office next to the dentist, that’s temporary. She’s only working as a counselor until she saves up enough to do her PhD. She’s going to be a psychoanalyst, the philosophical, Freudian type, unpicking people’s fears from the inside. She has a proper career plan.
I’ve got one second to make up my mind and all I can think about is Dad but then I think about Kip walking out of school and I’m not walking away from anything so I run after them and I jump on too.
If I get out of this alive, I will shoulder the responsibility for this family. I will work hard at school. I will be the most serious, most studious, most hard-working boy and I’ll do whatever Ma says and I’ll never do another naughty thing, not ever, not if I live to be a hundred.
I’ve put so little [money] aside it’s hardly worth hiding. A few coppers to get us through the week. Next week will have to worry about itself. At least it’s November now, heating up fast. I only need enough wood for cooking. It was different when I was in the munitions factory, before the men came home and we girls got our marching orders […] That’s the cold fact about the war: me and Dad never had it so good.
“I couldn’t go while Ma was alive.” Kip looks Jos square in the face when he says it. “After Connie died, after the inquest and having it in all the newspapers. Having our business picked over by strangers. Most of the women in Richmond would cross the street when they saw Ma coming. Got so she wouldn’t go out the front gate and then so she wouldn’t get out of bed. I couldn’t leave her.”
Kip has that set on his face that reminds me of his father, that wistful look. I’d never confess it to another living soul but some days I can’t bear the sight of that boy. It’s a judgment on me.
A husband and three littlies. The best days of my life. The reason women are put on the earth. There’s still hope for [Connie], to have a husband and children the right way, keeping them and not giving them up.
That first quickening, you never forget it. The first time you feel it, a cross between a squirming and a kicking, and you realize there’s another whole body enclosed within yours, and it’s made out of your very own flesh. While there’s a child of yours alive in the world, you never really die. They’re a part of your body living on without you.
From what [Kip] says, it seems like all kinds of stupid things had to be kept secret back then. When he says that his sister didn’t die from the flu, Stanzi just nods. Charlotte gets on her high horse about ridiculous sexist taboos and lies and nothing to be ashamed of. Grandma [Annabel] smiles. You can’t imagine what it was like back then, she says. So much pain, all covered over.
“Alec. You must know this. People disappear. They just go puff. Thin air. Every time you see someone, you never know if you’re seeing them for the last time. Drink them in, Alec. Kiss them. It’s very important.”
When me and Libby were little, Grandpa [Kip] was in charge of all the dad stuff. He took photos of us, hundreds of them. He still has them over at their apartment at the retirement village. He was the one who taught us to play poker and took us to the football.
It seems that all my life I’ve had nothing I’ve desired and I’ve given up having desires at all. Now I know what it feels like to want and I’ll give anything to have it.
The secret to happiness is to be grateful. I think about Ma [Jean], widowed with three children, and Nan who was a slave all her life, first in domestic service and then to Pop, then back to the ironing factory when she was widowed. I have a wonderful job. I have my mother and Francis, and I have Kip my darling Kip.
And here is the most wonderful thing of all. I have had one night with the man of my heart and, just this once, I have had something that I wanted.
