Freedom for Bridie

By

Alma Harris

If only someone had listened...  Well, I listened all right.   Only I never understood what I was listening to.

Whenever I think of Bridie, I remember her sitting on that front garden wall

or even high up on one of the gate pillars of our end-of-terrace Victorian house.  She would be shouting and laughing with the rest of her gang or morose and silent, kicking her heels, in the evening when they’d gone home.

Bridie had fair freckled skin and red-gold ringlets.  From the time I could reach to stand on the chair by our kitchen window, she always seemed to be out there and the centre of attention.

We lived on the top floor and I wasn’t allowed to play outside.  This was London still reeling from the blitz, littered with poignant half-houses where rooms had been blown off leaving chimney breasts and wallpaper bare to the elements.  I resented my imprisonment.

Bridie lived in the middle flat and her crowd consisted of the basement boys, their cousin Steve whose trousers were always too short, and other regulars I couldn’t place.  Our front wall was their meeting place and from there they would move like a swarm into the road with a ball, down the railway embankment or over the bomb sites.

In the summer they would sprawl on the grass with Dandy or Beano, comics my parents considered ‘unsuitable’ while opposite the timber yard droned on.

To the right the road became a bridge over the main railway line north and was regularly obscured by clouds of steam from passing trains.  Bridie and the gang would play through it, emerging like ghosts from the white mist.  Once or twice a day the new diesel engine bellowed out its two-tone warning as it powered up the track.

All this I could see from my other view-point, the window on the stairs to our attic.  From here also, if I craned my neck, I could see down the side of the house to the little dark strip of no-man’s land where things got dumped.

My mother thought the basement family ‘common’ but I liked them.  They were vulgar in a friendly way and a warm smell of unwashed bonhomie would flood out if their door was left open.  In the summer Pa would do a cursory clean of the sidecar and they’d set off for Southend with the boys inside and Ma’s bum hanging each side over the pillion.

The O’Reillys were different altogether.  Bridie’s father often worked nights and would bang on the ceiling with a broomstick if I made a noise during the day.

Mrs O’Reilly was a telephonist.  She wore make-up, pencil skirts and high-heels and could talk forever.  She was as red-haired as he was dark, and the sounds of their discord would filter up through the floorboards into my quiet bedroom.

The O’Reillys seemed to exist in a different dimension, unfettered by time, whereas time ruled our every minute.  My father left for his job as a shipping clerk at precisely the same time every morning to catch the tube to King’s Cross and returned at precisely the same time at night.  My mother sat all day in front of her sewing machine in the attic making plastic raincoats for an East End factory.  They were saving to ‘get out of London’ but I didn’t know what ‘out of London’ was.  The furthest I got was to the school round the corner.

Of course I saw Bridie in the playground but she was nine and I was six.  She was always racing about with the in-crowd, her red locks flying in the wind.  Where I was plain, she was ravishing:  where I was timid, she was precocious – where I was a prisoner, I thought darkly, she was free.

Often she would still be out on the pillar in the twilight when I was sent to bed.  When Mrs O’Reilly was on evenings, Mr O’Reilly would shout Bridie from the window to come in.  She would stiffen and pretend not to hear and then he would come out slowly and get her.

Regularly I would whine to my mother about going out to play.  “Why can’t I?” I would nag, stamping my foot, trying to conjure up a rage.

“Because,” she would say and left it at that.  Once when I persisted, she said, “Because we love you,” but that made no sense.  If she loved me, she would let me come and go like Bridie.

I tried another tack.  Could I have a cat, like Bridie?  My mother took her foot off the sewing machine pedal, raised her eyes to heaven and asked what in God’s name she had done to deserve this child.  Eventually she said, “The landlord doesn’t allow pets.”

We did play sometimes, Bridie and I, if our mothers met.  They would talk about whether Ada on the corner veg stall had anything especially good, or how old Mrs Templeton, who had lost her entire family in the war, was keeping.

About this time my father would spend whole Saturdays away, travelling to exotic places like Sidcup or Potters Bar to look at new housing developments.  My mother pressed on feverishly with the raincoats and I pestered her to make rompers for my new unbreakable doll.  This one I could play with fearlessly, unlike Jenny, my perfect beauty with the porcelain face.

I got the rompers and my parents got the bungalow.  We were moving to the country.

The day before we left, as we were hauling tea-chests up to the flat, we met Mrs O’Reilly.  She looked mad and strange, with red-rimmed eyes and huge bags under them.  My mother, who usually didn’t hold with having neighbours in, brought her into the kitchen while I calculated that a cup of tea would mean a whole half-hour with Bridie to myself.

Unfortunately my heroine wasn’t into dolls.  When she saw the baby wet her nappy via a pinhole in her buttocks, she laughed and said dolls were stupid and were made nothing like people.  Then in one smooth movement she seized

Jenny from her pram and flung her out of the door, over the banister and into the stairwell.  Even from that distance I could see her beautiful fractured face.

Then I had Bridie by the wrists, twisting them so they would burn and I brought them up to my mouth and bit and hung on until I drew blood and she sank down in defeat, mewing like a kitten.

I ran down the attic steps and burst into the kitchen.  My mother was holding Mrs O’Reilly and crying.  She prised me gently away from her legs and cradled me against her until my sobs subsided.  She dried my face carefully as if it too was made of porcelain.  I had expected her to avenge me but she let Mrs O’Reilly lead Bridie silently past us and on to the communal landing.

We didn’t see them again.  The removal van came early in the morning and my father took a last photo of me with the old box Brownie camera.  I had a middle parting and two plaits with bows and I posed, holding out the skirt of my blue-and-white polka-dot dress, on the pavement by the bridge.

On the new estate there were new friends, wide verges and everyone knew everyone else.  I could go out to play.  I was one of the gang at last.

Once, when I could bring myself to, I asked my mother about Bridie.  They were going back to Ireland, she said, it didn’t suit them here.

But looking at the picture of the house in the newspaper today, and the words below, I know they didn’t go back to Ireland.  Not Bridie and her mother anyway.  For all I know, Mr O’Reilly might have.

If only someone had listened.   Someone who’d have known it wasn’t a cat.

The house itself looks just the same.  Perhaps a bit smarter, maybe a bit cleaner – the door is now a glossy black instead of brown, and the window frames look new.

It’s the garden which has changed.  Where once there was a patch of mud and some uneven grass, there is now a smart paved area and concrete tubs with apricot-coloured begonias spilling out of them. There is some ongoing work at the side of the house and some slabs near one of those small cement mixers.  If I look closely I can just see the stripey police tape barring access to the area.

You see, our old part of London has become very trendy and someone’s been tidying up.  There’s no place now for a little strip of no-man’s land where things get dumped – like Bridie and her mother, along with tyres and wood and broken glass under the bits of tarpaulin and rotten leaves.

And now that I am grown up, I know why my mother was holding Mrs O’Reilly and why Bridie smashed my doll and why I wasn’t really a prisoner and she was.

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