Free My Daughter, My Mother by Annie Murray

brought her from Nora Paige’s house to her classes, then took her back again. New billets were not easy to find.
    Winter drew in and their breath was white on the air. She had worn out her pumps and the Birmingham Mail charity boots, which had once been Tommy’s, were still too big. She clumped along in them, her legs bare in all weathers under the old skirt and vest and royal-blue jumper. All the time she was hungry – so hungry.
    One day, in the vicarage, during the mid-morning break, when they were each given a beaker of milk and a biscuit, Margaret had wolfed hers down in two bites. Joan was sitting next to her, taking tiny nibbles of hers. Margaret felt saliva rush into her mouth. Quick as a snake she leaned round, snatched the biscuit and stuffed it into her mouth. Joan set up a shrieking.
    ‘Whatever’s wrong, Joan?’ Miss Cooper asked. She was the tall redhead who stomped through the snow to fetch Joan to school each day.
    ‘Margaret took my biscuit!’
    ‘Margaret!’ Miss Cooper bore down on her. Margaret chewed and swallowed quickly, as if the disappearance of the biscuit could make it not have happened. Everyone was now staring at her. ‘What d’you think you’re doing, snatching Joan’s biscuit?’
    Margaret stared back in silence. Her appearance seemed to aggravate people. ‘Well, say something, child.’
    ‘I dunno,’ Margaret said through her adenoids.
    Miss Cooper clicked her tongue. ‘Well, don’t do it again. That’s greedy and it’s stealing . Now, Joan, there’s another biscuit for you. Eat up.’
    Mrs Paige fed her less and less. Because Margaret was a sturdy child it took a while before anyone noticed, though Miss Cooper often urged her to buck up and listen. But one day soon after she arrived at the makeshift school, blackness suddenly closed down on her like a lid. She came out of the faint feeling sick and confused.
    Then it started snowing. On the way to school Miss Peters coughed, bending over, eyes streaming.
    ‘Oh dear,’ she kept murmuring as she straightened up. ‘How am I to manage?’
    Soon afterwards Miss Peters disappeared. Miss Cooper arrived the next morning in a great hurry, having already walked to collect Joan.
    ‘I’m afraid Miss Peters has been taken ill,’ she said, peering curiously in at Nora Paige’s cottage door. There was nothing to see: just the unlived-in parlour. ‘They’ve had to take her home – she’s developed pneumonia.’
    ‘Oh dear,’ Mrs Paige said. ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ Her eyes widened, then blinked hard.
    What did the teachers say among themselves about Nora Paige, Margaret wondered now? Did the vicar’s wife say, ‘Oh, she’s been a recluse since her husband died’? These things she only found out later. ‘TB, you know, soon after the war ended. He must have been dead fifteen years by now at least.’
    ‘Well, she’s an odd one all right,’ she heard Miss Cooper mutter as the door closed.
    Margaret, cold and weak, her feet already so chilled that she could barely feel them, followed Miss Cooper through the snow. The wind bit into her cheeks. Each meal she had was smaller than the last. She was eternally hungry.
    It was almost impossible to steal food. Everything in the low cupboard was in tins or jars, and the big meat safe with its mesh door, where Mrs Paige kept bread, cheese, meat and butter, was locked and the key removed.
    ‘Don’t think I don’t know your cunning,’ Nora Paige would say, slipping the key into her pocket. ‘I’m not having you taking the food out of my poor sick husband’s mouth.’
    There were no more free apples, or blackberries in the hedgerow, now.
    One evening Mrs Paige was standing by the table in her flat shoes, the beige wool of her sleeves pushed up her brawny arms as she spooned out a portion of food to take to Ernest. On a small plate she put a helping for Margaret – two morsels of meat, a spoonful of gravy, a mouthful of boiled potato.
    ‘You see, Meg,’ she announced,