The Photographer's Wife Read Online Free PDF

she tries, hopelessly, to break free. Glenda is pulling on her mother’s arm, shouting, crying, “Mum, please, no! It’s dangerous! I’m scared. Please, Mum, please!”
    Barbara stands on the wet pavement watching all of this, smelling the smoke, sensing the heat of the flames on her face, and listening to the crackle of burning wood and the pop of windows exploding with the heat. She sees when the fireman finally loses patience and slaps her mother hard across the side of the face. She sees how everything stops, how Minnie’s arms drop to her sides, how she doubles up and cries out a long warbling, “Nooo!” before allowing herself to be led, looking crumpled like an abandoned set of clothes, from the front door, then back into the street, first by Glenda and then by an air-raid warden who has run to them in order to join the fray.
    Glenda returns for Barbara, and the fireman, who is still watching Minnie in case she makes a dash for it, (he’s seen it happen before) crosses the road to address them.
    “You’ll be able to get your things tomorrow, alright?” he tells the girls. “So just get your Mum out of here. She doesn’t want to be here tonight. She doesn’t want to be seeing this.”
    “Take her where?” Glenda asks. “Where should we go?”
    “But that’s our house,” Barbara protests angrily, feeling that the nasty man who slapped her mother hasn’t understood this simple fact.
    “Go to a friend’s or something,” the fireman says. “Or go to a shelter. And then come back tomorrow once the fire’s out.”
    Glenda nods rigidly. “Thank you,” she says, and Barbara blinks up at her in confusion.
    She starts to lead Barbara along the road, towards where Minnie is now sitting on a wall being spoken to sternly by the air-raid warden, but as they pass the collapsed house – the Robinson place – Barbara freezes.
    “Come on!” Glenda prompts, pulling at her hand, then, “What?”
    With her free hand, Barbara is pointing, and Glenda now follows her gaze, her features forming a frown in the flickering light. “Oh,” she says.
    “Look,” Barbara says.
    “Yes. Um, go to Mum and I’ll... I’ll tell the fireman. He’ll know what to do.”
    Barbara walks robotically on, her head swivelling as she does so, unable to tear her eyes from the horrific sight. Behind her, she hears Glenda shout to the fireman. “Excuse me! Excuse me! Mr Fireman!”
    “Yes?” the man replies.
    “There’s someone stuck under that door,” she says, her voice quivering with emotion.
    “What?”
    “There’s a hand sticking out. Over there. Someone’s under that door.”
    “Jesus!” the fireman says, walking backwards so that he can look at the door in question while still pointing his hose at the fire opposite. “Alright love,” he says calmly, reasonably, as if this is all quite routine. “Don’t worry. We’ll get them out. You just go with your mum now. Off you go!”
    As Glenda runs to catch up with Barbara and takes her hand again, they hear him shout, “Jack! JACK! They missed one over ‘ere. There’s another body. Can you come give us a hand?”
     
    Minnie does not go to work that day and the girls do not go to school. For want of a better idea, with Minnie still in a worrying, trance-like state that Glenda has no idea how to deal with, they return to the youth club shelter. Being daytime, and with no warnings having sounded, the shelter is almost empty now.
    Minnie lies down on an empty mattress and, as far as the girls can see, sleeps all day.
    “What’s wrong with Mum?” Barbara asks.
    “She’s just tired,” Glenda tells her. “She didn’t get any sleep last night. She can’t sleep sitting up. You know that.”
    But Minnie isn’t tired. And she isn’t sleeping either. She has simply run out of courage. It’s not, as everyone keeps pretending, an unlimited resource.
    Because the hours in the shelter are so horrifically slow, Glenda takes Barbara, who has been getting fidgety, for