These days, most women having a first child would come and have it here, in hospital. There were still midwives, naturally, for later children or for people stuck out in the country, but these were all midwives working for the National Health. They weren’t freelancers like his mam, and no one called them deathmongers these days. Tom thought it was a good thing, by and large. He was a modern bloke, and he for one was glad that his wife was just now having her child delivered in a modern ward, with proper doctors gathered round, not in a dark back bedroom with some cackling old horror like his mam bent over her. Doreen had enough reservations about Tommy’s mam as things stood, and if May had stuck her nose into the birth of their first child then that would have put the tin hat on the occasion good and proper. Tommy shivered, even thinking of it, though that might have just been the November night.
It was Doreen who’d rescued Tommy from his bachelor state and his mam’s approbation. That had been a bit of luck, his finding her. It was just like his Lou had said, he was too reticent with girls and couldn’t turn the charm on like their Walt or Frank. Tom’s only hope had been to find somebody even shyer than what he was, and in Doreen that’s just what he’d found, his perfect complement. His other half. Like Tom, she wasn’t shy as in the sense of cowardly or weak. There was a backbone under her reserve; she just preferred a quiet life without a lot of fuss, the same as he did. She, like him and every other bloke who’d seen the inside of a trench, preferred to keep her head down and get on with things, to not attract attention. It was something of a marvel that he’d spotted her at all, stood shrinking back behind her louder, gigglier mates from work, as if for fear that anyone should see how beautiful she was, with her big watery blue eyes, her slightly long face and her bark-brown hair curled up into a wave. With her theatre glow, that mistiness she had about her like a lobby card. He’d told her, soon after they’d met, that she looked like a film star. She’d just pursed her lips into a little smile and tutted, telling him he shouldn’t be so soft.
They’d wed in 1952 and though it would have made more sense, in terms of room, for them to go and live in Green Street with his mam, no one had wanted that. Not Tommy’s mam, not Tommy, and particularly not Doreen. She was the only person Tom had ever met who, even though she had a timid and retiring nature, wouldn’t put up with May Warren’s bullying or her intimidating manner. Tom and Doreen had instead decided to reside down in St. Andrew’s Road with Doreen’s mother Clara and the other members of her family that lived there, or at least had lived there until recently. Though the idea of him and Doreen living with Tom’s mam had been like something from a nightmare, these last two years living down the bottom of Spring Lane and Scarletwell Street hadn’t been much better.
Now, this hadn’t been because of Doreen’s mam, the way it would have been with Tommy’s, round in Green Street. Clara Swan had worked in service and remained a very proper and religious woman in her own quiet fashion, and though she could be both strict and stern if things should warrant it, she was in almost every way completely different to May Warren, thin and upright where his mam was short and stout. No, Tommy got on fine with Doreen’s mam, just like he did with both her brothers and her sister, their respective spouses and their children. It was just that there had been so many of them, until recently, and it was such a little house.
Admittedly, the eldest brother, James, he’d married and moved out before Tom got there, but it had still been a tight fit, packing everybody in. First there was Doreen’s mam herself, whose house it was, or at least it were her name on the rent book. Next was Doreen’s sister, Emma, and her husband Ted, with their two children, John and little Eileen. Emma, older than Doreen, was the first woman railway guard in England, and it had been on the railway that she’d met her dashing engine driver husband, Ted, who cleaned his teeth with chimney soot. Then there was Doreen’s younger brother Alf, the bus-driver, his wife Queen and their toddler, baby Jim. With Tommy and Doreen as well that had made getting on ten people crammed in a three-bedroom terraced house.
Doreen and Tom had started out with a few months of sleeping best they could upon the couch in the front room. Emma and Ted and their two kids had the front bedroom, Clara had the smaller bedroom next to that, which was above the living room, then Alf and Queen were in the smallest room, right at the back above the kitchen. Baby Jim slept in the wardrobe drawer. The nights, then, had been cramped-up and embarrassing, but early evenings had been worse, just after tea with everybody home from work and gathered in the living room to listen to the wireless. Ted and Emma would have hostile silences between them that could last for days, just glaring at each other over the tinned salmon sandwiches and ITMA catchphrases: “Dis iss Funf speaking”. “Mind my bike”, and, “Don’t forget the diver”. Alf would come home every night exhausted after being up so early with the buses, and would flake out snoring on the mat before the fire, just like a cat big as a man and dressed in a bus driver’s uniform. His wife Queen, who was also by coincidence the sister of Ted, Emma’s husband, would, on most nights, just sit by the fire and weep. You couldn’t blame her. Upstairs, baby Jim would have climbed from his wardrobe drawer and started banging on the bedroom door, sometimes for hours on end. You couldn’t blame him, either, the poor little sod, not living in a wardrobe. If that wouldn’t send you cornery, Tom didn’t know what would. Baby Jim’s difficulty was, he was too clever. No one in the Swan or Warren families was what you’d call a dim bulb, but baby Jim was the next generation and you could see from the outset that they’d be as sharp as knives, particularly baby Jim. By three years old he’d managed to escape twice from the house and get four blocks away before the police apprehended him and brought him back. Mind you, given how hazardous a child’s life could be down St. Andrew’s Road, he’d probably have been a good sight safer if they’d left him where he was.
Again, it wasn’t that the adults in the house were negligent, it was just there were seven of them and three children, getting on each other’s wicks and underneath each other’s feet, so accidents were bound to happen. Ted and Emma’s eldest, John, had liked to sit up on the back of the armchair before the day he lost his balance and tipped over, falling backwards out the window of the living room into the back yard in a shower of broken glass. Then Ted and Emma’s youngest, pretty Eileen, had fell face down in the fire with all the red hot coals, necessitating an immediate race up to the family doctor, Dr. Grey in Broad Street, his Doreen and her big sister Emma running frantically across a darkened Mayorhold holding the miraculously unscarred child wrapped in a blanket.
Mercifully, this last year things had fallen right. First Ted and Em had moved out, to a house further along St. Andrew’s Road, in Semilong. Then Alf and Queen had gone as well, up to the Birchfield Road in Abington. They’d taken baby Jim with them, of course, but for some reason, at the age of five, he’d broken out of his new home as well and managed to negotiate about two miles of busy roads, finding his way back to the Boroughs and his gran’s house unescorted. Tom supposed it might have been that Jim, in the same way that new-hatched ducklings sometimes got confused, had mixed up his attachment to his mum with an attachment to the wardrobe. Anyway, the upshot of it was that there were only Clara, Tom and Doreen living down St. Andrew’s Road at present. Tom and Doreen had the big front bedroom Ted and Emma had vacated, and with fewer people milling round, this baby that the two of them were having would be born into a safer house. Into a safer world, or at least that’s what everybody hoped.