Free Another Life Altogether by Elaine Beale

air raids, severe food rationing, and the immediate prospect of a German invasion.
    “When you were my age,” I interrupted, “you didn’t get moved into the middle of nowhere with nothing to do.”
    “The trouble with you is you’re spoiled.” My mother rolled up her
Woman’s Realm
and threw it in my direction. It fluttered, pages splayed, at my feet. “Take her with you, for God’s sake, Mike.”
    IT WAS A FIVE-MINUTE drive into the village, along a road bordered by thick hedgerows and grass verges speckled with the color of dandelions, daisies, and a variety of pink and purple flowers. The sky was massive, a billowing tent of gray. As my father drove, his silence punctuated every now and then with a weighty sigh, I peered through the rain-spattered windscreen at the shifting shapes of the dark clouds, the way the changing light transformed their boundaries, so that they pushed and merged into one another like waves. I imagined myself falling upward into all that gloom and radiance, flying like the swallows that had their nest in the eaves of our house, soaring, arms pushed behind me in a V-shaped arrow, to somewhere else.
    “I think we should do a bit of shopping while we’re here, don’t you, love?” my father said as he parked. He pointed toward a little Co-op supermarket across the street. “We could do with a bit of food in the house.”
    I couldn’t have agreed more. For the past several days we’d beensubsisting on baked beans, sardines, cheese, or tinned spaghetti on toast. Although I’d never been particularly fond of vegetables, even I was beginning to think at least having something green on my plate might not be such a bad idea.
    I helped my father carry the clothes into the tiny launderette, the Midham Wash-It-All, push them into the machines, and place our coins in the slots. Then we dashed through the rain over to the Co-op and launched ourselves into the luster of tightly packed grocery shelves under flickering fluorescent lights.
    I was quite excited to discover that Midham had a Co-op. The Coop gave out stamps for everything you bought. These you pasted into books and could redeem for a wonderful array of items—everything from tea cozies (two books) to toasters (fifty books) and portable televisions (three hundred books). Just over a year ago, my mother had started collecting Co-op stamps. In her initial frenzy, she’d filled twenty books in a matter of weeks. She’d decided to aim for the toaster, though I’d tried to persuade her to hold out for the television.
    “You could give it to me for a birthday present,” I’d suggested. “Then I can watch the telly in my bedroom and I won’t be a bother to you and Dad.”
    The way she’d refused even to acknowledge this proposal, however, implied that she had other things in mind. Indeed, she’d maintained a resolute commitment to the toaster and might well have made it were it not for my father finding out that she had taken to shopping at the Co-op almost every day, buying far more than we needed and stashing the excess under their bed. The discovery had come when he stubbed his toe on a tin of Heinz mulligatawny soup and bent down to discover that the entire floor there was occupied by an assortment of tins, packages, and boxes.
    Following this, my father had decided that it was best if my mother took a break from doing the shopping. Soon he and I got into a routine of going together on Friday evenings when the Co-op in Hull had late-night closing and he could go after work. And, having inherited thetwenty-seven and a half books my mother had managed to fill, I was able to begin avidly saving for a portable television. Unfortunately, at the rate my father preferred to shop, I calculated that it would take me another five years. So I was constantly trying to buy more items, or at least more expensive ones, and each of our shopping trips became a battle between the two of us, with me surreptitiously trying to place things in the