Read Online London Pride by Beryl Kingston - Free Book Online Page A

‘You make me sick, always on about it. I don’t want to hear about it ever again.’
    â€˜I wish she’d tell us what’s going on,’ Peggy mourned. ‘You ask her, Joanie.’
    â€˜No, you,’ Joan said. ‘She wouldn’t tell me.’
    â€˜She wouldn’t tell me neither.’
    â€˜She’s coming upstairs,’ Joan warned. ‘Pretend to be asleep.’
    So Peggy closed her eyes obediently, resigning herself to sleep and continued ignorance.
    The next day when she and Joan came home to dinner they found Mum and Baby waiting in the hall in their outdoor clothes, hats, gloves and all. And Mum had something to tell them.
    â€˜Your Dad’s asked to see you,’ she said. ‘We’ll have dinner when we get back. I shan’t send you back to school this afternoon. We’ll go the long way round. We don’t want everyone gawping.’
    â€˜Is he better?’ Peggy said as they followed her out of the house again.
    â€˜We’ll see when we get there,’ Mum said. But she looked so stern it wasn’t an encouraging answer.
    They walked between the great stones of the inner and outer walls, and the sun was warm on their heads and shoulders, as a fearful ice expanded in Peggy’s chest. Please don’t let him be worse, she prayed. He can’t be worse. Not here. Not in the Tower. People are protected in the Tower. Please dear God, protect my dad. Make him be better.
    The porter on duty at the hospital block that morning was an old friend. He used to throw balls back for them when they were playing on the Green and sometimes, when he wasn’t too busy, he could be persuaded to take one end of the long rope for skipping. But now he looked as solemn as Mum.
    â€˜Come to see your poor Dad ‘ave yer?’ he said to the girls. ‘Sister Turner’ll be along presently.’
    They stood together in the unfamiliar hall, shuffling and embarrassed and growing steadily colder now that they were out of the sunshine. Sister Turner was a long time coming and every second diminished the hope of good news. Joan and Peggy shifted from foot to foot and tried not to look at one another or their mother, and Baby sat on the bench by the wall feeling small and staring at the floor. But at last Sister Turner approached, skirts swishing. It was a surprise to all three children when she took Peggy and Baby by the hand, signalled with her eyes that Joan was to follow, and led them away, leaving Mum on her own in the hall.
    But they didn’t say anything because you didn’t argue with doctors and nurses. They simply followed her meekly up the stairs and along a corridor smelling of disinfectant and gleaming with floor polish and full of brown doors, each with its own neat label and some open enough to allow them a glimpse of a heaped bed and a pale face against a pillow. They knew that they were foreigners in this place, interlopers who had to be on their best behaviour to survive, so when Sister Turner opened one of the closed doors, they hesitated, unsure whether they weresupposed to go in or not. She smiled at them quite kindly and as they still didn’t move, she ushered them round the edge of the door with one hand placed briefly but firmly against their necks.
    They were in a white brightly-lit space with white curtains and a table with a spittoon on it and a dish full of cotton wool and a plain, glass jug full of water, and a white bed with three red cylinders standing beside it like bombs.
    It was a few seconds before any of them realized that the person in the bed was their father, even though they were expecting to see him. He’d changed so much.
    He was lying limply against a triangular mound of pillows, with his hands resting on the coverlet and his eyes shut tight, and he looked frail and small as though he’d shrunk. His skin was greyish-yellow, his cheeks had caved in, his hair and moustache looked like dried grass,