Free One Blue Moon by Catrin Collier Page B

hands.
    ‘There’s twopence in there, love. Get me two fags and an apple over the road,’ the voice pleaded.
    ‘OK. Hang on.’
    ‘For pity’s sake be quick, love. If the master’s around he’ll have my guts for garters. I’m in enough stick as it is.’
    ‘I’ll be as quick as I can,’ she called back touchily. It was one thing to agree to do a favour, quite another to be told how to do it. She took the twopence and crossed the road to the corner shop, smiling, despite the cold and the rain, at the memory of an awful fight she’d had with her brother Will, when she’d found out that he and Eddie had once stood under the wall collecting the pennies and pocketing them. After half an hour the inmates had become suspicious, but not before the pair of them had collected one and a penny. They’d spent the entire haul on penny dabs, farthing sherbets, sweet tobacco and Thomas and Evans pop. And what was even worse, they’d refused to give her or her cousin Maud a single lick of their ill-gotten gains.
    Burning with temper, an unassuaged sweet tooth and self-righteous indignation, she’d run home and told her mam. Megan had hurtled down the hill to replace the money from her own meagre stock, making both boys stand in the cold for a further two hours until someone found the courage to lower another basket. But they’d never been sure that the inmates who’d paid over the pennies had been the same inmates who’d got the goods. The best part about the escapade was that William had been denied sweets for an entire month afterwards. How she’d enjoyed licking all her lollies and toffees, slowly ... very slowly ... in front of him during that month.
    Still smiling, she pushed open the door of the shop. The swollen wood grated over the uneven red quarry-tiled floor, accompanying the shrill clang of the bell with a deeper resonance.
    ‘Diana, it’s lovely to see you back home love,’ Mr Rees, Wyn’s father, chirped cheerfully from behind his counter.
    ‘It’s good to be back home,’ Diana replied, feeling happy for the first time since her train had pulled into Pontypridd that morning.
    ‘I’ll have an apple and two cigarettes please, Mr Rees.’
    ‘Basket across the road?’ he wheezed as he took the coins.
    ‘You guessed.’
    ‘They’re starting early tonight. The master caught them at it a couple of weeks back and threatened to put out all the casuals.’
    ‘And himself out of a job?’
    ‘Fat chance,’ Mr Rees laughed.
    ‘Tell you what,’ Diana produced another penny from the depths of her damp handbag. ‘I’ll take another two Woodbines please, Mr Rees.’
    ‘Taken up smoking, have you, love?’
    ‘Something like that,’ Diana said lightly. ‘Oh and by the way, will you please thank your Wyn for me? I meant to do it myself but he disappeared before I had a chance to. He carried our Maud out of station yard over to Ronnie’s café this morning, when she fainted. I don’t know what I would have done without him.’
    ‘I won’t forget, love,’ he smiled with an odd expression on his sickly yellow face.
    ‘Thanks.’ Diana smiled as she shut the shop door behind her.
    ‘That one’s as soft as her mam ever was,’ Mr Rees told his next customer fondly, as he watched Diana cross the road clutching her apple and cigarettes. ‘And Megan was one in a million,’ he murmured, remembering a courtship he had begun two years after his wife’s death; it had come to an untimely end, with the appearance of Harry Griffiths on the scene.
    As Diana put the apple and four cigarettes into the basket, and gave it a tug, an illogical, superstitious, almost prayer-like hope crossed her mind. Perhaps the fates – and her Aunt Elizabeth – would be kinder to her for sharing what little she had with those who had even less.
    ‘Haydn, fasten this for me, will you?’ Tessie Clark, one of the more ‘forward’ girls, stepped out of the grubby, sweet-smelling, communal dressing room that the female chorus