Читать книгу Fitting In - Colin Thompson - Страница 40

1949 – MUMMIES AND DADDIES

‘Why do I always have to be the mummy?’ Anna, the girl next door, asked.

‘Because you’re the girl,’ I told her.

‘I want to be the daddy,’ she said.

‘Well, I’m the daddy. You have to be the mummy and stay at home with the baby and cook the dinner.’

We were both seven years old. Her mummy and daddy came from Greece and we were standing in the gloom of the abandoned air-raid shelter in their back garden.

Every house down Audley Road built a shelter during the war. Some were no more than corrugated tin covered with earth. They had been taken down years ago. Others, built of concrete, had been harder to demolish and a lot of people had just covered them with climbing roses and kept the lawnmower in there.

My grandparents had built their shelter underground in the front garden. As a baby, I slept through long nights in it, safe in the comforting smells of damp earth and condensed milk. A few miles away London had burned, but out in the suburbs the nights were generally calm and uneventful. Only one house in our street had been hit by a bomb. Our shelter had been sealed up and hidden under crazy paving and a bed of rose bushes, a tomb of ghosts and darkness. I imagine it’s still down there and whoever owns the house now won’t have the faintest idea it’s there.

I was born during the war, but I was only three when it ended and I have no memories of it, but its remnants and aftermath were still around. As my grandfather drove me through London in our big blue Wolseley, I peered over the edge of the window at a different world, a post-war gloom where grey kids with dirty faces and toy swords played on exciting-looking bomb sites in streets where the houses had no gardens or bathrooms. There was nothing like that in Ealing, W5. You could hear a pin drop three streets away. Our world was laid out in tidy squares, clean suburbs, nice gardens. I had an electric train set Uncle Ken brought me from Germany and a big wooden fort my grandfather got made by a German prisoner of war, with a place in the bottom where I could keep all my soldiers and tanks.

We didn’t just live on the right side of the tracks, we owned the factories that made the tracks and the trains that ran on them. Except we didn’t personally. My family actually owned the factories that had made