The Photographer's Wife Read Online Free PDF Page B

a walk. They ramble aimlessly through the empty streets, some untouched by the bombing, some missing houses or shops, and a few, like their own, so unrecognisable that Glenda worries they are lost.
    In Liverpool Street they see a demonstration by communists demanding access to the underground stations for shelter, so they stand and watch and listen to the chanting until the police arrive and things start to get raucous, whereupon Glenda shepherds them back towards Shoreditch.
    As the daylight starts to fade, they pass back down their own street. The flames have been extinguished now and their house, though blackened and windowless, is otherwise undamaged. Sandwiched between the smouldering remains of number twenty-six and the pile of rubble that is number twenty-two, it makes a forlorn sight.
    The girls independently cast glances at the collapsed house opposite to check. They both see that the door and the hand have gone.
    Looking at their own house, Barbara asks, “Can we go inside?”
    “We’re not supposed to. It’s unsafe, I think.”
    “Unsafe?”
    “It might fall down.”
    Barbara nods. Seeing that Glenda is furtively checking left and right, she says, “But you’re going to go inside anyway and get Mum’s tin.”
    “Yes,” Glenda says. “Yes, I think so.”
    “It’s in the cooker.”
    “I know. If someone hasn’t nicked it. I want to get my nice dress, too, before someone nicks that.”
    “Your birthday dress?”
    “Yes.”
    “Can I have Lucy Loop?”
    “If I can see her,” Glenda says, glancing left and right again, then sprinting past the burned-out building and around to the back of the house.
     
    When they get back to the shelter, Minnie is still lying on her back staring at the ceiling. The place is filling up now and her occupancy of an entire mattress will soon be cause for jealousy.
    “I got the tin,” Glenda tells her proudly, and Minnie’s face starts to animate as if someone has swapped in new batteries. First her brow wrinkles, then her eyes widen, then she sits up and stares peculiarly at Glenda as if she has perhaps spoken some foreign language that she doesn’t quite understand.
    “Everything’s still in it, I think,” Glenda says, proffering the tin and nodding encouragingly.
    Minnie swallows, then snatches the rusty Jacob’s Cracker tin from her daughter’s grasp.
    She pulls off the lid and starts to empty the contents: a roll of pound notes with an elastic band around them, a pile of dog-eared photos, the girls’ birth certificates, her mother’s headband, Seamus’ broken watch... All of these, she casts aside. They are not her primary concern.
    And then she finds her wedding ring. She slips it onto her finger and says, “Thank God for that. That won’t be coming off again.” She looks up at Glenda and manages a weak smile. “You’re a good girl, Glenda,” she says. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.” And Barbara wishes that it had been she who braved the danger of the house to recover the box.
    “Can we look at the pictures?” Glenda asks.
    Minnie sighs, then nods and pats the mattress beside her. “Course you can,” she says, then addressing Barbara and spotting the doll under her arm, “You too. Bring Lucy Loop and come sit on my lap.”
    Barbara slides between her mother’s arms and for the first time today, feels safe again.
    “That was our first trip out,” Minnie says, pulling the first tatty photo from the pile. “That’s Margate pier, that is.”
    All three stare at the picture, a plain but pretty woman smiling sheepishly, holding hands with a good looking lad all buttoned up in his best Sunday suit.
    Barbara reaches out and runs her finger across the image of her father, as if perhaps she might touch him, as if perhaps that might make him seem more real to her.
    The image is so alien, so detached from everything around them, that none of them can think of a word to say, so they just sit, a little awed, the mother and her two