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It was a story she liked to tell; it made her feel a part of something bigger than herself, tied to a time when there were bigger things to feel a part of. She'd told it again a few weeks earlier, looking at the same picture with a group of her friends after dinner one night. Someone had mentioned seeing it on the way in, and she'd led them all through to the hallway to stand around it, balancing their cups of coffee on thin white saucers while they listened and smiled and nodded, and remembered stories of their own, and went quiet at the appropriate time. Whenever he'd heard her tell the story, people had always gone quiet at the same appropriate time.
It was taken in 1943, she said, gesturing towards the photo, a small black-and-white studio portrait mounted on a greying cardboard surround, a name and number scribbled in soft illegible pencil along the bottom. Just before I was born, she said, placing herself firmly into that generation. He must have had it taken before going away on service for the second time, to the Med, I think, and sent it back from Portsmouth for my mother to put up on the mantelpiece while he was away. Pausing here, as she always did, picturing the man in the strange uniform above the hearth, watching over her and her mother while they crouched under the Morrison shelter in the back room, the ground shaking, firelight flashing past outside, or greeting them when they came home from the public shelter in the morning with the all-clear ringing out down the street, the house safe for another day and the garden strewn with rubble from next door but one. Remembering the morning her mother had tried to explain that a bomb had landed on her grandparents' house, and that her grandparents wouldn't be coming round for tea any more.
It was the Med, wasn't it? she asked, glancing across at him. I can never remember. Everyone turned to look, and he shrugged, smiling apologetically.
Don't look at me, he said, I'm not a historian, and they all laughed.
Albert Carter, their father, had been twenty-seven when the picture was taken, but he looked a lot younger; fresh-faced, smiling broadly, his skin so smooth that it was hard to believe he'd ever had to shave. His hair was slicked back, with the comb-lines as straight as a slide-rule, and his smile lifted the same creases around his eyes that David could remember seeing as a boy. The uniform looked a little too big for him, hanging loose around the shoulders, and there was none of the formal regalia which might have been expected in a portrait photograph, no spit-polished brass, or epaulettes, or braiding; it was a uniform which looked purely functional, ready for the serious business of crewing a ship into battle.
Of course, Susan said, I don't remember much about the war, I was too young. All I can remember, really, is this man arriving in the house, like the man in the picture but older and heavier, and not smiling. The others leant in towards the photograph as she spoke, looking at Albert Carter's fixed and frozen smile. He just appeared, she said, there was no discussion, he was just suddenly lurking about the place, making the house much smaller than it had been and taking up my mother's time. Smelling unfamiliar and damp, she said, laughing, as though she was unsure what she meant. But that's the thing I always remember, she said. His not being there and then being there, and nobody asking my opinion. The others smiled at this, as people usually did.
David was going to tell someone this story with the picture in his hand, holding on to it for a moment before passing it over, feeling the rough and crinkled texture of the greying card, turning it over to read the soft pencilled dates and numbers on the back, running his fingers again across the scratches scored into the photograph's dull surface. Dozens of scratches, mostly too faint to see unless the picture was turned into the light; mostly, except for three deep scars which had split and torn right through the skin of the paper, gouged across the young man's smiling face.
Susan explained that she'd made these marks, one afternoon when her father had been ho
me for a few months. This was the part of the story where people always went quiet, and looked at the picture more closely, or turned to her and nodded, or smiled wryly because they could guess exactly what she was going to say. She'd been told to take a nap so that her mother and father could have a lie down while the new baby, David, was sleeping. Auntie Julia, whose house they were all staying in until they could find something of their own, was out doing some shopping. Restless and bored, Susan took a small metallic comb from her father's desk, grabbed the picture from the mantelpiece, and scoured frantically across its surface before making a tearful escape to the bedroom.
The most awful thing, she said, pointing out an ashtray on the hall table to a guest with a cigarette, is that nothing was ever said. The picture was replaced with another one, almost identical, and nobody ever mentioned it, she said.
Goodness, said a woman with a bright red scarf tied around her neck. Really? Susan nodded.
Not a word, she said. We found the damaged original in a box of his things after he died, and I insisted on keeping it. I've only recently put it up though, she added. The dinner guests peered closely at the picture for a few moments more, mentioning similar stories of their own before gradually moving back into the dining room.
My mother told me I used to try and drag my father out of their bed, the woman with the scarf said, laughing, and the man with the cigarette smiled at her, nodding.
Anyone want another coffee? Susan asked, as she followed them back to the table.
David stood in the hall for a moment longer, looking at the picture, tracing the scratches with his fingers, imagining the distress of the three-year-old girl which they recorded so well. He looked at the eyes, the smile, the face of the man who had brought him up so lovingly and was now gone, and he turned away.
You'll be careful with it though? Susan said, later, when he asked if he could borrow the picture for a while. She undipped it from its frame and handed it over to him, and he told her that yes, of course, he'd be careful. And, I mean, are you sure this is a good idea? she asked, the whole thing? and he told her that yes, thank you, it was.
2 Handwritten list of household items, c.1947
When Dorothy Carter was twenty-seven she wrote a list, sitting at the kitchen table, tapping her pen against the side of her face while she thought of everything she wanted to include. When she'd finished she pinned it to the back of the utility-room door, where it stayed until the day she finally moved out, and as David was helping to pack away her things he took it down and slipped it quickly into his pocket, thinking that someone might be interested in having a look.
He imagined her sitting at the kitchen table that first day, with unopened suitcases and boxes all over the clean hardwearing linoleum floor, a trunk, a bundle of bedding tied up with string. Susan stamping and clattering around the hard bare rooms, testing the echo of her voice against the walls, or playing in the sand and rubble at the back of the house. Albert would have been on his way back to London already, returning the borrowed bread van in time for that night's deliveries, having stopped on the way out to take a photo of Dorothy by the front door with the new handbag he'd bought her. He imagined her looking out through the window at the unfinished road piled high with timber and roof tiles, the other houses still skeletal, scaffolded, half-built; or standing to open and close the spotless cupboard doors.
It was so much more than we were expecting, she told David once. It was so much more than I felt we deserved.
The new house had its own front garden, and a path leading up to the door. It had an indoor toilet and a bath. There were fitted cabinets in the kitchen, and an airing cupboard, and electric lighting throughout. There was a cupboard under the stairs instead of a damp cellar. He found it difficult to imagine, when she told him all this, that these things had once been enough to seem like a miracle, to stun someone into speechless tears, but they had. Later, when he watched her saying the same things to Kate, he could see that Kate didn't believe her at all, saying, and did you make your own entertainment in them days Nana? Glancing at him and biting back a smile, not noticing how quietly her grandmother said yes love, we did, you're right.
She'd never been inside a new house before. She'd grown up in a tiny soft-walled cottage in the Suffolk countryside, where the only new buildings were the Nissen huts and hangars of the new airfields, where a bathroom was a kitchen for six and a half days of the week and the cooking was done on the fire, and she had no way of picturing what a new house might be like. Theirs was one of the first houses in the development to be finished, and they'd had to drive carefully through acres of Coventry's bomb-flattened streets to reach it, waiting for them, perfect and untouched. We could still smell the paint when we went inside, she told him. She'd never seen rooms without furniture before, and the emptiness made the house feel so large that she was convinced they'd made a mistake until his father went outside and checked the number on the door.
And after he'd left with the van she sat at the table, steadying herself, trying to write the list. She was frightened, she told David once. She didn't think they were entitled to it. All that work, for them, when there were so many people in worse off positions. She was worried for a long time that someone was going to come knocking on the front door with a clipboard, asking for forms they didn't have, saying there'd been some kind of mistake.
She sat there, thinking through all the things that needed to be done, while his sister played in what would one day be the garden and he slept in a pushchair in the room next door. She made a list of jobs which needed doing straight away: putting sheets and blankets on the mattresses Julia had given them; laying out the clothes; cleaning the kitchen cabinets and scouring the surfaces; putting away their small stock of food; getting the rest of those boxes out of the way so some cooking could be done. And then she made a list of Things We Will Need', the list he still had now, a list which started with the immediate essentials and worked through to the fanciful and frivolous, a compendium of wishful thinking.
There was a space in the kitchen made especially for a refrigerator she told him, much later. Anything seemed possible.
By the time his father had got back from London the next evening, she'd measured the windows for curtains, and planned carpets for the floors and the stairs. She'd chosen colours and wallpapers for each of the rooms, and listed the ornaments and accessories which she'd seen in magazines and long wanted. She'd listed an electric iron, a top-loading washing machine, a vacuum cleaner, a new wireless set, an electric sewing machine. Albert laughed when he saw the list, the story went, telling her that she'd missed out the moon on a stick, but he kissed her all the same and said they'd see what they could do. They stood there for a long time, looking at it, their hands touching, until Susan came running in with a banged elbow, or David woke up crying in the next room, or the kettle came to the boil, and they both turned away.
And the list turned yellow with grease and flour and thumb-marks, and ticks appeared as each item was sweated and dreamed and saved into life. The lawn turned green with sprouting grass-seed, and rose bushes blushed into bloom all around it. A rug rolled out across their bedroom floor, and carpet stepped neatly down the stairs. Patterned nets were stretched across the front windows, and curtain material purchased, sewn, and hung. A carpet sweeper appeared for the new carpet, and settled in under the stairs with the brushes and buckets and mops, waiting to be put out of work by a new vacuum cleaner. And one bright day, six or seven years later, a gleaming white refrigerator, complete with icebox, was delivered by men in smart overalls from the newly rebuilt Owen's department store in town. It's not quite the moon on a stick, his father said, when he got home from work and saw the cold white cabinet humming quietly in the corner of the kitchen, but it's not far off.
This is the sort of person his mother was, he thought whenever he looked again at the list, when he imagined her reinventing her family's life in that way, with a new child, a new house, a new city outside waiting to be rebuilt. This was what he would tell anyone who asked, showing them the yellowed sheet of paper; my mother wanted all these things for us, and look how much of it she got. This was what he was going to say, if there was anyone who wanted to know.
3 Local map, Whitechapel district, London, annotated, c.1950
It was his father's idea to move to Coventry. He heard that from his mother, more than once, sitting around the kitchen table while his father read the evening paper and grumbled about some factory closure or rates increase. It was your father's idea to move here, she'd say, to David and Susan, pretending that she thought he couldn't hear. Or he heard it from their bedroom late at night, their tempered voices breaking through the thin walls and closed doors; this was your idea remember Albert, not mine. To which his father usually replied that they'd otherwise still be squatting in Julia's bloody spare room and how would she like that then, eh?
