The Girl From Barefoot House Read Online Free PDF Page A

hysterically, clinging to her mother. ‘Don’t leave me by meself again.’
    ‘Don’t fret, luv. I won’t.’ Mam stroked her face tenderly. ‘If we’re going to go, we’ll go together. I couldn’t live without my little girl, my Petal.’
    Mam stayed in for three nights in a row and finished off the whisky. There were no raids, but her nerves were on edge. ‘This can’t go on,’ she kept saying. ‘I’m stuck in a rut, taking the easy option.’ She couldn’t sit still, and talked frequently about ‘getting a proper job. I might take a look around tomorrow’. They could move out toSpeke or Kirkby, where she could work in a munitions factory. The wages were good. Though Josie would have to change schools. She said this in a tired way, as if it were an insurmountable problem.
    ‘I don’t mind, Mam.’ Josie was thrilled at the idea of living in what she imagined was the countryside, preferably plumb in the middle of a bluebell wood, like a girl in one of her stories. At the same time she recognised with a very adult awareness that Mam was searching for ways not to go to Speke or Kirkby.
    During that summer holiday, Josie had come to terms with several things. The oddness of her life, for instance, the peculiar thing, the precise nature of which she was still not sure of, that Mam did for a living. What hurt most was knowing that, although Mam sincerely meant it when she said she couldn’t live without her and that she loved her more than anyone in the world, she didn’t love her quite enough to get the proper job she was always on about, to move somewhere different. Perhaps it was the drink that had weakened her spirit, made her lose the courage she might once have had. What’s more, Mam wasn’t fit to work in a munitions factory unless she stopped drinking, something which Josie had given up all hope of happening. Kate had written to Maude. She worked on something complicated called a capstan lathe. It was all highly responsible, very difficult, and needed careful precision. But Mam’s hands shook when she poured a cup of tea.
    All this did nothing to make Josie love her mother less. In fact, she only loved her more.
    There was a raid on the fourth night that Mam stayed in. The siren went early, just after seven o’clock. The hairs prickled on Josie’s neck. She crawled on to her mother’s knee, and they listened to the far-away hum ofenemy planes. Fifteen minutes later the welcome sound of the all clear split the still, evening air.
    ‘I think I’ll nip out for a little while,’ Mam said when it finished.
    ‘ No! ’ Josie seized her arm. She never wanted to stay in the room alone again. The aeroplanes might come back, the siren might go again, bombs might fall.
    ‘I can’t stay in for ever, luv.’ Mam blushed and twisted her thumbs together on her knee, as if for the first time she felt uncomfortable with her daughter about whatever it was she did. ‘I’ve got a living to make.’
    ‘Then take me with you. Please , Mam.’
    Her mother looked at her for a minute, frowning. ‘I suppose I could,’ she said eventually. ‘It’s still broad daylight. You could sit on the steps outside. Lots of kids do.’
    The Prince Albert public house was on the corner of two short streets behind the Rialto ballroom. It was small, but impressive. The bottom half was shiny dark green tiles, separated from the plain brick upstairs by a wide band of masonry on which a row of diamond shapes had been carved and painted gold. The corner entrance was particularly grand. Five curved stone steps led to a pair of giant swing doors with fancy brass handles. Across one street, there was a small chandler’s, the window a jumble of buckets and mops and tins of paint, a fish shop with an empty marble slab behind the glass, and a sweet and tobacconist’s, still open. An elderly woman was sitting on a chair by the door, taking advantage of the evening sun.
    When Josie and her mother arrived, a boy about her own age and a