All the Days of Our Lives Read Online Free PDF

gaze. Mother was far more frightening that Uncle Patrick. She didn’t understand what was the matter with him, only that he struggled heroically day after day.
    ‘There is no one in this house who is fit to be called a “loony”. It’s a spiteful lie and we’re not having it – d’you understand?’
    ‘Yes.’ She was trembling. ‘Mother.’
    One of the best things about Uncle Patrick was that he lived a very austere life. He was not a drinker or smoker, so had a few pennies to spare. Above anything else, he loved being in water.
    ‘I learned to swim by jumping in the waves,’ he told Katie. ‘We’d spend hours down on the strand. Nothing like it. I’ll teach you one day.’
    Neither of their poor little houses had a bathroom, and Vera flatly refused to use the tin bath that hung on a nail in the yard at the back.
    ‘I’m not going back and forth round there with buckets of water,’ she said with a shudder. Even if Patrick offered to carry the water, she wasn’t having it. ‘I shall wash myself in privacy – heaven knows, there’s little enough of it round here as it is.’
    Once every week or ten days they walked up to Nechells Park Road to the huge, ornate building that contained the Public Baths. Vera and Katie would pay their pennies for a hot bath and a towel and join the queue waiting on the benches for the bath cubicles. The soap the baths provided was a yellow carbolic, hard as a stone, so Vera brought their own soap, a cake of Lifebuoy sliced in half so that each of them could take it in with them.
    You were not expected to spend much time in the bath. The attendants who came in, in overalls with their big scrubbing brushes to clean the bath after each customer, were banging on the door if you’d been in there ten minutes.
    Katie loved the baths, and lying in the warm water, especially on cold winter days when you’d gone in with freezing feet, was a real treat. Sometimes they stung as she got into the luxurious, shimmering water and her chilblains would ache and itch. She would ease her long, slender body down into the warmth, pick up the soap and wash away any tide marks as fast as possible so that she could lie there, the tiles of the steamy cubicle dewy with condensation, wallowing until the banging started;
    ‘Hurry up in there. Time’s up – there’s plenty more waiting out ’ere!’
    Katie and her mother took baths, but Uncle Patrick went as often as he could afford to the main swimming baths in the same building. He plunged his bony frame into the water and, with a jerky, awkward style, ploughed up and down, one length breaststroke, one length crawl, alternating. Whatever state he was in before he left the house, he always returned looking a bit better.
    ‘The water’s grand,’ he told Katie. ‘Nothing like getting in there for a good bathe.’ And occasionally, on the way back, he brought home fish and chips and pease pudding, all of which Vera seemed to think was vulgar, but she ate it anyway and Katie thought it the most delicious food you could ever have.
    Every so often Patrick would promise, ‘When you’re a bit bigger I’ll take you along with me.’
    Katie grew up used to her double life, the secrecy of home. But then Em’s mother Cynthia was taken away and everything was confusing. Even then, she understood dimly that what had happened was too close to home, and that it made her and her mother cruel in their fear of disgrace. Who was mad? What did that mean? How was any of this to be understood when no one ever talked about it properly? All she knew was that it was frightening and that no one wanted to be near it. It led to disaster. So she in her turn had been cruel to Em. Had had to be.

Four
     
    Shortly before Christmas when Katie was nine, something happened that changed their lives. Vera O’Neill got a job in the millinery department of Lewis’s Department Store. She was employed to help with the Christmas rush, but when she had been there only a few days,