Free War Babies by Annie Murray

in his hand. He rolled his eyes in affectionate
despair. ‘There’s no stopping ’er.’
    ‘Ooh, I like a good mooch around the market, I do,’ Mrs Davies said with relish. ‘Most Sat’d’ys we go, don’t we, Lilian?’
    The market! Since they left the Rag Market, Peggy had never been back. She did her shopping locally and never felt the need to go into town. It was months since they had set foot in the place
and now Rachel realized how much she missed it: the bustle and chatter, the sights and smells.
    ‘Oh!’ she cried, hardly thinking. ‘Can I come with you?’
    ‘Can she, Mom?’ Lilian cried.
    ‘Doesn’t your mother ever go round the market?’ Mrs Davies said incredulously. Rachel didn’t answer. She knew Peggy didn’t like people knowing she’d been a
market trader. ‘Well, of course you can, bab. Bring a penny for the trolleybus and we’ll have a little outing. How’s that?’
    Peggy handed over sixpence, only too glad to have someone else take her child off her hands for a Saturday afternoon.
    Rachel stood on the packed trolleybus beside Lilian and her mother as they trundled along the Coventry Road, through Small Heath and onwards into Birmingham. She kept slipping
her hand into the pocket of her coat to feel for the sixpence and polishing it against the soft inside of the pocket. She imagined that the dull, tarnished thing might come out looking new minted
if she polished it enough. Mrs Davies had paid for her ticket, saying she could pay her back later.
    She could see nothing outside. The bus was stuffy, smelly with hot bodies and old clothes. Her face was up close against the back of a woman in a black and white dog-tooth coat and it kept
tickling her nose. She wrinkled her face up at Lilian, who giggled. There were murmurs of conversation around her, about shopping and day-to-day things, about somewhere called Czechoslovakia and
how Chamberlain and that fiddling little bit of paper weren’t going to stop Hitler. A woman just behind Rachel said, ‘I can’t stand the sound of them rattle things. Makes my blood
run cold, that noise.’
    ‘Better than being gassed,’ another offered, close to Rachel’s right ear.
    ‘Hmm – I s’pose . . . But the stink of those respirators. I can’t stand the smell of rubber, makes me gag . . .’
    ‘My brother Sid was gassed during the last lot. Only lasted a year after the war . . . That one was s’posed to have put a stop to all this. You can’t believe anything they say,
can yer?’
    There was going to be another war. It looked more and more like it. All around, people seemed to be saying so these days. They had all been allocated their black, rubbery gas masks. Fred and
Peggy had cleared out the cellar, in case there were bombs, they said. Rachel took no notice. And now all she could think of was going back to the market. She realized how much she missed it and
some of the people who worked there.
    Most of all she missed Gladys Poulter, Danny’s aunt. Even when Danny left and never came back and Gladys was quieter, sadder than before, she was good to Rachel. She always had a kind word
and offered her something from her inexhaustible supply of sweets. After that afternoon when the man dragged him away, it had changed her view of Danny. His father looked so rough and cruel. But
she had not been able to take in that Danny would not be back. Week after week she went in with Peggy to set up, thinking that one day, there he would be, beside Gladys Poulter with his box of
comics, swaggering along, crying out across the market in his strong voice. But he never was. Eventually she plucked up courage to ask, approaching Gladys timidly one day during a quiet moment.
Gladys was folding up items in her clothing pile.
    ‘Mrs Poulter?’ she said. ‘Is Danny ever coming back again?’
    To her surprise, Gladys Poulter’s face quivered and her eyes filled with tears. She wiped them away almost angrily.
    ‘I wish I knew, bab.’ She finished