She's Leaving Home Read Online Free PDF

the house. It was too small for a desk as well as two narrow beds, a wardrobe and a chest of drawers. She sat cross-legged on the bed by the window and arranged textbooks and files around her.
    The bed swayed and creaked. It had been her father’s in his bachelor days. He had told her how he had been pulled out of the Hayworth Street house in the autumn of 1944 when for the fourth time his home suffered from bombing. That last occasion it was a direct hit; Helen had seen the gap in the row of terraced houses, like a pulled tooth. Daniel had survived because he had been asleep on the sofa near the fire. The chimney breast had fallen intact across him. He had emerged black as the ace of spades, coughing and wiping the soot from his eyes, but his father – her grandfather – had suffered shrapnel wounds which turned to gangrene. Three weeks later, delirious with pain, the old man had died in the Royal Infirmary surrounded by dozens of similar cases. So when did the bed appear? Thisnarrow bed with its ancient noisy springs? Probably from a second-hand shop soon after, when Daniel must have been taken in by an accommodating friend. It felt older than he was.
    This family, Helen sensed, had been affected more by the war in Britain than by the genocide. True, Annie’s cousin’s family had been wiped out in Auschwitz; a survivor had made his way to Israel after terrible privations. But both Annie and her daughter, like Rita and her sister, were far more aware in their daily lives of acres of bomb-blasted devastation which had not yet been cleared and of the huge effort to restart the economy and to catch up both with overseas competitors and the expectations of ordinary people. All had a sense that the country was falling behind. They were probably culturally closer to their Christian neighbours than to distant relatives in Tel Aviv or Tiberias, though the older generation would have denied it. For them, assimilation was to be fought not welcomed.
    Yet despite the tribulations, her father had refused to quit the shattered city. Helen admired him for that. The promised lands – Canada, America, Australia – beckoned. Others couldn’t get away quick enough. That was her mother’s verdict on the speedy captures by Daniel’s cousins of clean-cut young men from the nearby USAF air-base at Burtonwood. The double wedding photos showed both girls smiling triumphantly, their soldier bridegrooms clean-cut in their uniforms. One bride had a baby in arms by the date the ship sailed. At this point in the narrative Annie would sniff audibly. If Gertie her sister-in-law was mentioned Annie would raise her eyes to heaven and mutter. As these women were close relations she could not express outright disapproval, not in her own daughter’s hearing. Helen would speculate to herself whether any of her female relatives had behaved scandalously, but suspected it was simply that their choices were far more adventurous than her mother’s.
    Had Daniel emigrated she, Helen, would have been born in America. Probably in Brooklyn. Gertie boasted an address in Queens, on Little Rock Parkway which sounded like a proper road. An open invitation was extended but the fare to New York was prohibitive. Nor had these newly naturalised Americans, who boasted of having done so well stateside, raised the funds to visit in the eighteen years since: not one of them.
    It was dark. The curtains should be drawn, but as with the bus she relished her vantage point. Down in the lighted kitchen of the house across the garden, plump Mrs Williams was lifting a large dish out of the oven. At her side a pile of plates, indifferent to meat or milk, awaited the casserole and potatoes, the cabbage and gravy, the suet pudding and custard. Mrs Williams, who was Welsh, was a better cook than her mother; or at least, a more generous one.
    A footstep came on the landing; her mother opened the door, her arms full of clean laundry. ‘Excuse me. I have to put this lot in the airing