Nan will just have to wait until I’ve finished this, unless you want to heat it up for her. It’s in the oven with yours. The boys have gone off somewhere like they always do and there’s all this needs doing. Good job it’s been a nice day, but it’s already starting to get damp.’ Her mother looked at her and smiled brightly. ‘Now come over here and I’ll show you whose clothes are whose. The boys don’t like it if their clothes get all mixed up!’
‘The boys, the boys. Don’t you want to know what’s been going on for me? I’ve been away for five years. Five years,’ Ruby said flatly without moving. The washing line was stretched the length of the small back yard, which was part paved and part vegetable garden. A small corrugated roof extended out from the scullery and provided cover for the mangle. At the end, the gate that led out into the back alley was open.
‘Don’t be silly, Ruby, we’ve got plenty of time to catch up on everything now you’re back for good. Back where you belong, not up there with those snobs. Here, hold this for me …’
Still smiling, Sarah pushed a battered laundry basket at her. Looking down, she remarked, ‘Those shoes are a bit too grown up for you. You’re only fifteen and they’ve got a heel …’
‘And they’re too big for you,’ Ruby replied quickly with a smile, aware of the way the conversation was about to go. ‘My feet are huge.’
‘That’s all right,’ her mother replied seriously, still looking at her daughter’s feet. ‘I can stuff paper in the toes.’
Ruby didn’t answer. She didn’t want an argument, but she could see her mother was going to find it hard to accept that Ruby had gone away a child and come back an independent young woman with a mind of her own and ambitions to fulfil.
At that moment, standing in the back yard with a washing basket of clothes in front of her, she knew that she couldn’t stay in Walthamstow. It had been her home when she was a child but now that she had seen a different way of life it was alien to her. She’d tried to do the right thing but she could see that her return had actually been nothing to do with her personally. It was simply a power struggle, with her mother and Ray asserting their position over the Wheatons.
She watched as her mother quickly took the washing off the line and transferred it to the basket Ruby was holding out. She pretended she was listening to her mother’s instruction about whose clothes were whose but she was already mentally composing her letter to George and Babs Wheaton, telling them she wanted to go back.
But even as she was doing it she knew that the letter would be the easy part. Persuading her mother and Ray would be the problem.
Three
Ruby found life back at the Blakeley family home far more difficult to deal with than she had ever expected and, as the weeks passed, it got worse rather than better. She looked after her grandmother, helped around the house and ran errands for her continually overworked and dog-tired mother. She did her duty as she saw it, the duty she had gone home to do, but nothing seemed enough. Alongside that she generally irritated her bombastic brother, Ray, as much as she could, her view being that if she annoyed him enough there wouldn’t be any objections to her leaving and going back to Cambridgeshire.
As the days passed she became increasingly obsessed with getting back to the Wheatons, and it always took several seconds when she woke up in the morning to remember where she was and then for the overwhelming sense of injustice to rise again. But her mother refused point blank to even discuss Ruby’s return to Melton.
‘Mum? I’m off to the High Street,’ Ruby shouted, quickly pulling the front door closed behind her and hotfooting it away from the house. She wanted to escape before she was given an even longer list of things to do and items to try to buy. She resented always having to do the shopping, especially with rationing making it such a chore, but at least it got her out of the house and away from her mother’s ongoing domestic grumblings, and Ray’s tormenting, which was made worse by her middle brother, Bobbie, slavishly agreeing with his every word. Arthur remained her friend as best he could, but his fear of upsetting his oldest brother meant he would always run off and hide rather than get involved.
Ray and Bobbie worked at the same motor repair garage so more often than not they left together in the morning on Ray’s beloved motorbike and arrived home together in the evening expecting their dinner to be waiting for them on the table, their clothes to be washed and ironed and their beds made.
And everything was always done. Their mother made sure of it.
Sarah Blakeley had easily accepted Ray’s declaration of himself as ‘Head of the Family’, and Ruby saw he was turning into a clone of his father, the man he and his brothers had always been petrified of. He carefully shaped his moustache in the same manner, tipped his flat cap at the same angle, and when he shrugged on his late father’s heavy overcoat the resemblance from a distance was perfect.
Ruby couldn’t understand why he would want to be just like the father who had always treated him so harshly but she didn’t comment; she simply observed and wondered why her mother didn’t stand up for the women in the house.
She was deep in thought as she walked and was almost at the bottom of the road when she heard her name being called.
‘Ruby! Ruby! Hang on a minute …’
She hesitated but didn’t turn round; without looking she knew that it was Johnnie from down the street, the man who’d carried her bags and caught her eye; the man she’d only seen in passing since that day, but who she had thought about and also heard much about.
‘Ruby!’ he shouted again. ‘Wait a minute and I’ll walk with you, Ruby Red.’
This time she stopped and waited with a smile for him to catch her up.
As he drew alongside he looked at her appreciatively and she was pleased she’d come back from the Wheatons’ with a decent selection of clothes and a secret lipstick. Clothes that had fortunately turned out to be mostly far too tight for her wide-hipped and ample-bosomed mother, despite the middle-aged woman trying her best to squeeze into them one by one.
‘Hello. What’s this Ruby Red silliness?’ she asked.
‘That’s what I’ve decided to call you, Ruby Red. Red for short. You look like a Red. Anyway, you look nice. Where are you off to?’
With a grin Ruby held up the shopping baskets. ‘Just running shopping errands for Mum and Nan, off to queue, queue, queue in the High Street. Again. My life is one long queue, hand over coupons, queue again.’
‘See? I was right. Didn’t take them long to get you back in harness. Big brother Ray said he was going to train you back into your place, as the family slave.’
Ruby laughed. ‘Shut up! He never said it like that! Do you think I’m daft enough to let you annoy me? Ray told me all about you and what you’re like, so don’t bother.’
‘Oh, so you were interested enough to ask him about me, then? I’m flattered.’
Ruby smiled up at him shyly as he fell in step beside her, his long legs taking just one step to two of hers.
‘Not really! Anyway, I don’t really mind getting the shopping for the moment. Ma has plenty to do with her job and everything. I do it for her, not the boys. And it’s just until I can get
