The Burning Summer Read online

  Ruthie thought it must be nice to get married, and cut your hair off and wear a wig. It would be much nicer than having your own hair brushed with a wire brush, that had long thin nails stuck in rubber, and pulled the knots till your eyes watered. Not that she was very hopeful of ever getting married like Mrs Coram was. Her mother was married, and she hadn’t cut her hair off.

  Ruthie had asked why not, once, when her mother was doing her hair with stuff in a saucer and an old toothbrush, but her mother had told her to stop nagging, and screwed her face up against the smell of the ammonia. So Ruthie wasn’t quite sure what would happen when she got married herself.

  From the door next to Black Sophie’s shop, Lilian came out. Lilian was a big girl—nearly nine—and Ruthie liked her. She had yellow hair, just like Ruthie’s mother’s hair the day after she had used the toothbrush and the ammonia, and she had it in smooth straight pieces on each side of her face. Ruthie admired this hair style very much, and would have liked to have yellow straight hair instead of her own black curls that got into knots.

  Lilian came over the street carefully not walking on any cracks. She stopped next to Ruthie, and stood on one foot.

  “You goin’ to school?”

  “Don’t know,” Ruthie said. “Was there a raid last night?”

  “Don’t know. They didn’t get me up. My mum’s still in bed, though. Maybe there was.”

  “My mummy’s up. But she gets up even if there was a raid. Because of Leon.”

  Lilian nodded. “You got to get up when you got a baby,” she said knowingly. “They cry.”

  Ruthie knew that very well. Leon cried in the mornings, because he was hungry. She would lie in bed in the mornings, looking across at him in his cot, his fat face creased while he bawled, wishing he didn’t cry when he was hungry. When he cried like that, her mother woke up and made her get up, and if she hadn’t woken before Leon started crying, it meant she hadn’t time to fix things before her mother found out about her bed.

  This was Ruthie’s biggest problem. Every night when she went to bed, she would lie very straight, screwing her toes up hard till they hurt, biting her bottom lip till that hurt too, praying to God. If she could hurt her toes and her lip very much while she prayed, perhaps God would listen to her, and not let her wet her bed. But it never worked.

  “Don’t let me wet my bed, please, God,” she would say inside her head. “Don’t let me wet my bed.” But she couldn’t hurt her toes and her lip enough, because she always wet her bed.

  When she first woke up, when the light first made the place inside her eyes red and sparkling, she would lie very still, not moving at all, because until she moved, she wouldn’t know, wouldn’t be sure. While she was quite still, she could tell herself God had listened, that she was dry today. But then she would move a little bit, tightening her bottom, and then she would know, feeling the warm dampness, smelling the thick familiar smell.

  If she had woken before Leon and her mother she could get up, and rearrange her bed, putting the wet part of the sheets to the bottom, so that if her mother was busy and only pulled the bed up instead of stripping it properly, she wouldn’t find the wetness. She could fold up her wet nightgown, and put it at the bottom of the clothes in the cupboard, and put on a dry one, and the wet one at the bottom would stay there till it worked its way to the top, and by then maybe it would be dry again.

  It was silly, really. None of the tricks ever worked; her mother always found out in the end, and Ruthie would be walloped for being sly as well as being a pisher, which was what her mother called her with her voice full of coldness. But still Ruthie tried.

  Once she had crept out of bed after she had been put there, and put a thick layer of newspaper under her, because she thought that then the wetness wouldn’t go through to the sheets, and she could throw the paper away in the dustbin in the morning. But the wetness had gone through, and worse still, the blackness from the printing on the paper had gone through, too, and made the sheet all black, and her mother had given her a hiding.

  It was a dreadful business, really. She would have to stand in the street beside her mother, feeling her face go hard and stiff while she listened to her mother telling the neighbours about her wetness, listened to them tutting as they looked at her with disapproval, telling her she was a naughty girl to be so dirty when her mother had such troubles already. She would see the sheets from her bed hanging out of the upstairs window of the house as she came along the street, with the tell-tale round stain in the middle, drying in the sun, so all the world would know that Ruthie was a pisher, a dirty girl who made trouble for her poor mother.

  “So are you going to school?” Lilian said again. “My mum’s asleep, so I can if I like.”

  “I’ll ask,” Ruthie said, and stood up carefully. Her knickers were dry, so she ran into the house happily, letting her gas mask in its brown rexine case bang comfortingly against her bottom.

  She ran up the stairs into the kitchen where her mother was sitting at the table with Leon on her lap, playing with him.

  Leon was laughing, his round face screwed up fatly, his two white teeth shining in his red mouth, and giggling delightedly as his mother rubbed her nose against his.

  “Kutchie, kutchie, kutchie,” Ruthie’s mother said, screwing her eyes up like Leon’s. “Kutchie, kutchie, kutchie!”

  “Mummy,” Ruthie said, “am I going to school? Lilian wants to know am I going to school.”

  Ruthie’s mother put Leon on the floor so that he could crawl about, and stretched.

  “I dunno.” She yawned so that the two gaps in her teeth on each side of the front ones showed, and Ruthie looked away. “You want to go?”

  “If Lilian goes. Her mum’s still asleep, so she doesn’t know if there was a raid last night. Was there a raid last night, Mummy?”

  “Not much.” Ruthie’s mother rubbed her face and looked vaguely worried. “Not much. Not to get up for. You want to go?”

  “Yes. If there wasn’t a raid, I can, can’t I?”

  “Oh, all right—only listen to me. If there should be a siren, you know what to do?”

  “Stay with Miss Fletcher, don’t run, walk, do what Miss Fletcher says, stay in the middle of the shelter, don’t sit near the wall, don’t come out till last.”

  “And come straight home at dinner time. None of your dawdling. And go to the lav now,” she called after Ruthie who was already halfway down the stairs.

  So Ruthie came back and went into the lavatory, and stood for a minute before she pulled the chain noisily and ran down the stairs to Lilian. She didn’t want to go to the lav now, but it wouldn’t do to say so.

  “All right,” she said to Lilian, and the two of them walked up the street to the alleyway at the end.

  The alleyway was the narrow covered passage that ran alongside Mrs Cohen’s grocery shop to Festival Street beyond, and although it was supposed to be a private alley for the shop people and the family who lived in the flat over the top, no one ever went round the other way, to the bottom of the street, round the corner, along Commercial Road to the beginning of Festival Street.

  Mrs Cohen was in front of her shop as they went by, and grinned at them.

  “So where you goin’?”

  “School,” Lilian said. “We’re going to school. There wasn’t a big raid last night, so we can go to school this morning.”

  “Gott se dank,” Mrs Cohen said, and gave them some broken biscuits from the box on the shelf in the front of the shop window.

  They went along Festival Street eating the biscuits, Lilian walking a bit in front of Ruthie, and getting most of the biscuits because Lilian was nearly nine and Ruthie was only seven so she had to do what Lilian said. And Lilian had said a long time ago that she was always to walk in front and get most of everything.

  Ruthie was very lucky to be friends with Lilian, and she knew it. There were only a few children left now in the street. Most of them had gone away. There were three girls older than Lilian, but they
were friends with each other; they didn’t want to be friends with Lilian because her mother wasn’t Jewish like their mothers. But Ruthie’s mother didn’t seem to mind who Ruthie was friends with as long as she kept out of the way and out of trouble, so when Lilian started to be friends with Ruthie, Ruthie was very happy. There was no one in the street her own age—only another baby the same age as Leon, and Leon himself, and you couldn’t be friends with babies.

  So she walked along Festival Street behind Lilian, eating the soft broken biscuits and she was happy. She liked Festival Street. It wasn’t as big or as noisy as Commercial Road, but it was much bigger than Aspen Street where they lived. Aspen Street had two shops—Mrs Cohen’s and Black Sophie’s—and houses. But Festival Street had lots of different shops, and a school, and stalls as well.

  The stalls were already up this morning, their awnings green and black and shabby in the bright sunshine, the women who looked after them already sitting in their old kitchen chairs next to the cigar boxes they used to put their money in, shouting across the street at each other, arguing with the women who were shopping at the stalls.

  Ruthie counted the stalls as they went by them. Potatoes and carrots and onions and cabbages, number one. The potatoes smelled of earth all mixed up with a lovely hungry onion smell, and the carrots were orange and green, the feathery leaves at the top flopping over the edges of the artificial grass sheet on the front of the stall.

  The woman who kept the stall was digging the dirty brass scoop from the scales into the pile of potatoes so that the potatoes tumbled helter skelter into it in a way that made Ruthie want to bounce like they did.

  She didn’t like the next stall so much. It was full of chickens, dead ones, hanging up by their feet with flattened bloody eyes glinting wickedly at her as she went past, the feathers round their long necks hanging loosely into a big ruff round the pimply skin on their plucked breasts. The woman who kept this stall had a big blue apron on, and it was smeared all black and purple with the blood she wiped on it from the big knife she used to cut the chickens open. She stood hugely in front of the scored chopping board at the front of the stall, the big knife glinting gaily in the sun as she slit the birds open, pulling the guts out of each one with a twist of her big red hand, tossing the waste into a smelly barrel at her side, dropping the smooth livers and crops into the chipped enamel dish in front of her. Sometimes Ruthie stayed to watch her, horribly fascinated by the yellow globules that were eggs without shells, the blue and green smoothness of the strings of entrails, the way the skin of the throats peeled off to show the curving reddish brown neck underneath. When her mother cooked a chicken she would put this piece into the soup, and called it the gorrigle, and Ruthie liked it, picking it up in her fingers to pull at the strips of chicken meat from the chain of little bones, with her teeth. But she was always sickened a bit when she watched the gorrigle being stripped of its skin covering at the chicken woman’s stall.

  The next stall was apples and pears and plums and bananas, not many bananas because there was a war on and you couldn’t get them like you used to do. They would be sold very quickly, the shoppers buying more apples and pears than they really wanted so that the woman who kept the stall would let them buy the yellowish green bananas. Ruthie liked this stall very much, because the woman who kept it was often sleeping in her chair as she went by, and if she was quick, she could take an apple from the front without being caught.

  The next two stalls were vegetables again, one of them kept by an old man who always wore a skull-cap, and who wore a heavy black suit all the time, even today when it was so hot the road seemed to wobble when you looked at it. It seemed to Ruthie that all the men in the world were old men with skull-caps and beards like this stall-holder and Mr Lipshitz at the synagogue. Sometimes there were men in brown uniforms, but they weren’t men, they were soldiers, nebbish. The women in Aspen Street always said Nebbish after they said soldier, and Ruthie thought that Nebbish was part of the word soldier, though she knew it was also a word you used about anything sad, like a baby who banged his head and cried, nebbish.

  Lilian was waiting to cross the road, looking back impatiently at Ruthie who was walking backwards past the last fruit stall, enjoying the green and red of the apples that were piled there.

  “Come on,” she said. “Come on, Ruthie.”

  So Ruthie came on, running with high steps so that her gas mask banged on her bottom, happy because she was going to school and her knickers were dry, and Mummy hadn’t done more than smack her once when her bed was wet that morning.

  CHAPTER THREE

  MISS FLETCHER and Mrs Ward were sitting at a big desk at the end of the assembly hall, the pile of registers in front of them. Lilian moved away from Ruthie as soon as they both came into the playground, making it quite clear to Ruthie that now they had arrived they were separate people again, not friends. You couldn’t be nine and friends with someone from the infants who was only seven, not when you were inside the school. So Ruthie went into the assembly hall where Miss Fletcher and Mrs Ward were sitting with the registers.

  There were hardly any children at the school because of the war, only enough for one class, a class that stayed in the assembly hall all the time, and the classrooms were empty, with all the chairs put on the desks, and only benches to sit on in the assembly hall.

  Ruthie walked to Mrs Ward and Miss Fletcher round the edge of the assembly hall. This was because you could still make footprints round the edges. The dust in the middle was all scratched up where people had walked to the benches, but round the edges it was thick enough to make footprints. Miss Fletcher sighed when she looked at the dust in the hall, and shook her head because there was no one around who would work at the school to clean it, and she had too much to cope with to start sweeping the place herself, didn’t she?

  Miss Fletcher smiled at Ruthie and made a mark on the register.

  “Hello, Ruth,” she said in her thin voice that was all flat in the middle when she talked, not round and fat like the people in Aspen Street talked. “How is our only infant?”

  “Hello, Miss,” Ruthie said.

  “Did you get up last night, Ruth, for the raid?” Miss Fletcher asked.

  “No, Miss. Mummy said it wasn’t much of a one. Not to get up for.” Privately, Ruthie thought it couldn’t have been a raid at all, really. You got up for real ones, and she hadn’t got up, so there hadn’t been one. But Miss Fletcher thought there had, so she didn’t like to say there hadn’t.

  “Get some beads, Ruth,” Miss Fletcher said. “Get some beads for now, and when everyone is here, we’ll do something else.”

  So Ruthie went to the cupboard in the corner and got some beads and sat on a bench to string them up into a big wooden necklace while Miss Fletcher and Mrs Ward marked the registers and collected all the children together.

  They did singing. Mrs Ward sat at the piano, with her bottom hanging over the edge of the seat, and played loudly, lifting her hands very high in the air all the time. Ruthie liked this very much, and when there was piano playing on the wireless at home, she would play on the edge of the table lifting her hands high like Mrs Ward did.

  They sang some songs that Ruthie knew, and a lot she didn’t, but she moved her mouth as though she were singing, sticking her tongue in and out to show she was singing the right words though she knew herself she was only pretending, and that it was scribble singing. One of the songs was called “Jerusalem”, and she didn’t look at Miss Fletcher waving her head and hands at the front while that one was being sung, because Miss Fletcher’s eyes always went red and hot looking while it was on, and she wiped them afterwards. Ruthie found herself go hot and frightened inside when she saw grownups do that. Grown-ups who cried were awful.

  There was milk and a biscuit after the singing. Mrs Ward brought the biscuits, and they were very dry, not soft and sweet like Mrs Cohen’s broken ones, but Ruthie always ate Mrs Ward’s out of politeness.

  It was while she was finishing her
milk, looking deep into the cup to see her face reflected in the shiny whiteness inside, that the sound came. It started soft, a long way away, and then it came closer, going up and down, high and thin, like Leon when he cried at bedtime. He cried differently when he was hungry, but at bedtime, just before he fell asleep, he cried high and thin like the siren.

  Mrs Ward dropped the biscuits in their tin and started to cluck at the children, while Miss Fletcher picked up the registers and put them under her arm. Until now the children had been good, doing what Mrs Ward and Miss Fletcher said, but now they knew it was all right to be naughty, and began to jump about, and run in and out of the benches, squealing at each other. Ruthie did too, because the others did, getting excited with them.

  Mrs Ward and Miss Fletcher shooed them along, collecting them into a long line, and hurried them out of the assembly hall, along the corridor to the playground.

  The playground was very hot, the grit sparkling with tiny flashes of red and blue the way it did on sunny days, and Ruthie wriggled her toes in her sandals, enjoying the hot feeling and the smell of tar, pushing her feet into the hot tarmac so that she made footprints in its soft hotness, walking very quickly behind the big girl in front who was running. She wasn’t to run when there was a siren, like you didn’t run across roads. You had to walk, and it was very good to see how fast you could walk without running.

  Already, there were some women at the gate, and as the children crossed the playground towards the big redbrick shelters on the boys’ side, one or two of them came hurrying into the playground to pull their children out, chivvying them along before them.

  Mrs Ward, behind Ruthie, tutted. “Stupid creatures— anything could happen before they get them back to their own shelters.”

  Ruthie could quite understand why some of the mothers came to take their children to their own shelters. The school shelter wasn’t nearly so nice as some of the ones in Aspen Street. The school shelter had rows of benches, and some buckets with lids on them in the corners, and piles of sandbags inside as well as outside. The lights were smelly, oil ones, and there weren’t very many of them, so that the corners of the big shelter were dark. Ruthie had been surprised when her mother told her always to stay in the middle of the shelter because it was safer there. She was surprised because she hadn’t thought her mother knew about the darkness in the corners, and how frightening it was there.