Free Helpless by Marianne Marsh Page B

windows and doors hung off rotten wood frames, showing the bare skeletons of staircases and crumbling inner walls.
    My heart sunk. Where has he brought me now? I wondered.
    Seeing my apprehension, he put his arm lightly on my shoulder and smiled at me – that warm smile I liked and trusted, and seeing it, I felt myself relax.
    ‘I remember all your stories, you know, Marianne,’ he said. ‘Especially those ones about the people who once lived in the farmer’s old house.’ Surprised at the turn of conversation, I gave him an inquiring look.
    ‘Come on, out you get. I’ve got something to show you here.’
    Pushing aside my misgivings, I obediently followed him through one of the doors and saw that he had led me into the husk of what must have been the street’s corner shop.
    Standing there looking around that empty place, he told me that as a boy his grandmother had lived in one of the houses and he had played in the street outside where we had parked. ‘Look around you,’ he said, pointing to the empty shelves. Then he started describing what the shop had once looked like. Its shelves had been full of jars of sweets, packets of tea, tinned food, fresh eggs and household items. The shopkeeper had stood for nearly twelve hours a day behind the battered counter, wrapping goods in paper parcels and selling cigarettes singly to the poor and giving credit to women who were waiting for their husband’s weekly pay packet to arrive. As he spoke, I too imagined what that once fully stocked shop had looked like.
    ‘See that nail,’ he said, pointing to one near where he told me the till had been placed. ‘That’s where he hung the book after he wrote down everything that was owed. Lots of people had to live on tick then.’
    As a paintbrush delicately paints pictures on canvases, so his words coloured in scenes of life in that street before the war broke out. I saw groups of scab-kneed raggedy boys playing hopscotch and cricket, rolling brightly coloured marbles and collecting John Player’s cigarette cards. Enthralled by his story-telling, I listened to how the same boys earned pennies for running errands for someone richer and older than they. How they then came into the shop clutching their shiny coin as they chose between buying a toffee apple, a packet of pink bubble gum or a black and white gobstopper.
    ‘I always liked those big stoppers,’ he said with a grin, and I tried to imagine him as he was then, but I couldn’t.
    He told me what it was like when war broke out and smooth-skinned teenage boys still too young to vote left the street to fight for king and country. How women said goodbye to their sons and husbands and waited for news of them. He described the air of despair that hung over the street when a telegram boy was seen calling on a house, for its arrival normally announced the death of someone serving in the war. He told of the bombers that droned in the night and the loads that fell over the East End and Essex and how the Battle of Britain had raged in the skies overhead.
    He described the street party that was thrown to celebrate the end of the war and how the street waited impatiently for its men to return.
    ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘this street was once a great community, but now it’s being pulled down to make way for some of those new blocks of council flats.’
    He paused then and looked at his watch, and I knew his story telling had finished.
    ‘Anyhow, you have a good look around these rooms and behind the counter. I’ll pop round the corner to see that mate of mine and come back for you.’ And before I could protest, he had gone.
    And it was then that two things happened simultaneously which made the hairs on the back of my neck bristle.
    I saw a door I hadn’t noticed before on the other side of the counter slowly open, letting in a dim light that cast shadows across the floor, and I heard a slithering, sliding noise that I did not recognize. The shadows in the doorway deepened, then