CHAPTER NINE

Every now and then Tory would be overtaken with grief for her absent children. The nights of sobbing seemed to come in a regular wave, separated by perhaps a fortnight or so, when the continual feeling of loss would suddenly clot into something bigger and more difficult to contain. It was like a refrain to the quieter, perpetual verse of her sorrow. It could be triggered by the silliest of things, the rediscovery of a token of their childhood in one of the back bedrooms, even something as flimsy as a particular colour or smell, if it prompted some more intense recollection.

It was the evenings that were hardest to bear, because those hours had been the most crowded with children. From the moment she had brought them home from school each day the house would be filled with their three-way conversations, with their feeding and bathing and playing. With the children around, the evenings had been her favourite time of day, and even now, with air raids, she still preferred the evenings. She might feel her children’s absence most painfully at this time, but there were still other comforts – the withdrawal of the daytime antagonizers (bosses, shopkeepers, coalmen, tinkers), the pleasures of silence and darkness. In a strange way, the evenings of the Blitz were even more peaceful – the utter darkness of the blackout, the deserted streets. The forces of antagonism didn’t just withdraw: they vanished completely, along with the city itself. Night-time had become what she had thought it was always meant to be: empty, mysterious, boundless. The bombs, both the cause of and the threat to this form of darkness, were the one sour element in the great romance of the darkened city, but they were not a challenge that had to be met. They were not to be argued with or stood up to. One simply had to endure them.

Another reason she missed her children was that she, now, was most definitely the child of the house. She didn’t even have the presence of a sane husband to shore up her status against her mother, who had become noticeably more bossy as the months of the war progressed. It seemed an age ago that Mrs Head had returned from Waseminster, humbly insisting that Tory wouldn’t know she was there, that she wouldn’t get under her feet. How had it happened that she now found herself running hither and thither at her mother’s behest, frequently apologizing, and listening attentively, with bowed head to endless dispensations of motherly advice?

At the same time, Tory could sometimes relish the comfort of being a daughter, especially in the evenings, when she and her mother would sit together in the dining room. The work of the day over, she liked listening to Mrs Head.

Her mother had a very clever way of making artificial flowers out of scraps of old material – frayed curtains, worn-out cushion covers, outgrown children’s clothes. It involved sewing and folding in such ways that Tory could never follow so that she would end up with something like a squashed purple carnation where her mother had crafted a magnificent, radiant sunflower. It was an undoubted talent her mother had, and a resourceful one as well. More than once Tory had found that a pair of her faded knickers, which she had still thought wearable, had been transformed into the delicate petal of a peony or water-lily. Tory’s mother had more or less given up passing judgement on her daughter’s wilting efforts, but it was as they were making another little spray for the empty vases that Tory mentioned the gym at Farraway’s.

To Tory’s surprise, her mother knew about George Farraway.

‘Oh, so it is the same Farraway,’ Mrs Head said. ‘I did wonder.’

‘The same Farraway?’

‘As the boxer. He was a very famous man around here for a little while. Did well for himself and went into business. I heard he had a pub, and – that’s right – he did open up a factory of some sort. Well, I’m glad to see he’s made something, after all that trouble.’

‘What trouble?’

There was a half-beat’s pause before Mrs Head answered, ‘He killed a man,’ she said, trying to sound casual. ‘In the ring,’ she added, as if Tory might have thought otherwise. ‘Nothing he could have done about it – boxing is a brutal sport. But I think he lost his nerve after that, and was never quite the same man. One of the papers tried to pin the blame on him, and he took it to heart. There was some legal fussing. I can remember the first time I saw him fight in public …’

This was too much for Tory to accept, that her mother had ever been in the audience at a boxing match, and she said so.

‘No, you silly girl, I’ve never been to a boxing match in my life. But at the fairs we used to go to, on Blackheath or Woolwich Common, they would have fight booths where you could just wander in. It was where all the young boxers used to start. They don’t have them any more of course – this was back before the Great War, when you were a little girl. You used to love them, though I’m not sure I felt happy about children being let in …’

‘You mean you took me to see boxing matches?’ Tory was floundering in new uncertainties about her childhood. She did have the vaguest memories of the old fairs on the different commons and heaths around south-east London, but she couldn’t remember the fight booths.

‘It was more Papa, really. He would carry you into the tents on his shoulders, and you would be cheering as loudly as the rest of them in there. Arthur was quite a man for the rough sports but, then, he was the son of a docker …’

Tory tried hard to remember. Perhaps there was the slimmest recollection of a baying crowd, with combatants at the centre, the grey dome of her father’s head rising from between her legs.

She wanted to ask her mother more, but didn’t want to appear too interested so let it rest.

A week later she went back to the gym.