The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot, Marianne Cronin [top fiction books of all time txt] 📗

‘How will they know?’ I’d asked, when my mother had painted the wobbly line the year before.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘they won’t know.’

‘So we could fill it all the way to the top?’ I asked.

‘Not past the overflow,’ she’d said, trying to navigate the paintbrush past the plug chain without painting it too.

‘We could fill it up all the way?’

‘Yes,’ she’d said, ‘I suppose.’

‘Why don’t we just do that then?’

‘Because,’ she said, ‘they might not know, but we’d know. And how could you face your class at school knowing you’d had a big hot bath and they’d all had to clean themselves in puddles?’

I didn’t say anything, but I felt that I probably wouldn’t have minded that as much as my mother expected.

The air raid siren screaming, my mother scooped me up from the warm water and roughly rubbed at my arms and legs with the towel. I whined that she was hurting me and she told me she was trying to be fast.

‘Come on, Margot,’ she said in the sing-song voice that she used whenever she was trying to cover her fear, and she hurried me down the stairs, out of the kitchen door and into the back garden.

Outside it was icy; even the grass underfoot had frozen. My breath danced away on the air and I stopped still.

‘Come on,’ she said, the pressure beginning to really tell in her voice.

I was dressed only in a towel and standing in our garden in the middle of winter, and I had no desire to go down into the cold, damp Anderson shelter. I started crying.

When the war was still new, my mother had made a game of the air raids, by marking down in a notebook every time we used the shelter. ‘Our fifteenth visit,’ she would say, as though we were having fun and not hiding from fire falling from the sky.

We’d built the Anderson shelter with the help of some non-combatant soldiers provided by the local council. I’d watched as they’d packed the earth on top of the roof, so that what was once a square, simple garden was now home to a human rabbit warren. They’d talked to my mother about keeping it dry, and what necessities to store inside. They’d warned her not to smoke down there because the air would become thick.

Before they left, the larger of the two soldiers had asked me if I had any questions for them.

‘Can we get out to go to the toilet?’ I asked.

He laughed. ‘You can’t get out for any reason until the siren stops.’

‘Then how do we go to the toilet?’ I asked.

The answer was revealed to be – any way you wanted. My mother’s solution was a large tin bucket. It lived in the corner of the shelter beside some magazines and newspapers, which were mostly for reading but also functioned as toilet paper.

‘I shall be very proud of you,’ my mother said when she installed the bucket, ‘if you never have to use this bucket. You can have my jam ration any day that we come down here and you don’t use it.’ Jam was a big incentive for me at the time so I’d never used the bucket.

‘Hurry up, Margot,’ my mother said. Standing only in my towel in the bitterly cold air, I fixed her with a scowl and slowly followed her. She pushed open the corrugated iron door to reveal my least favourite grandmother squatting in the middle of the shelter, her knickers around her ankles and her skirt hitched up around her hips, urinating into the bucket on the floor.

For a moment, it seemed that even the air raid siren had fallen silent, and all I could hear was the hiss of my least favourite grandmother’s urine hitting the inside of the bucket. In the unfortunate lighting from above, we could see the specks of wee that were splashing onto the floor. My grandmother’s face was set in a picture of horror.

My grandmother finished urinating and then had to grope about for some newspaper. After dabbing at herself with an article from the Telegraph, she un-straddled the bucket and pulled up her knickers. Then she picked up the bucket, which now had a good few inches of wee sloshing around in it and a sodden strip from the Telegraph floating on top, and carried it very carefully to the corner of the shelter. Not making eye contact with us, she sat primly on the bench on the right-hand side of the shelter and smoothed down her pleated skirt, as though she were sitting in church on Sunday. From beside her, she picked up a novel and opened it. She held it in front of her face, but her eyes were staring, unblinking, into the distance.

My mother and I both wordlessly took a seat on the bench opposite. Sitting down, I could see the flush of my grandmother’s cheeks. The bitter stink of urine wrapped itself around my nose and, I imagine, my mother’s and grandmother’s noses too. It made itself the fourth occupant in our tiny shelter.

My mother gently brushed my wet hair and then coaxed me into the spare dress she’d stored away under the bench for emergencies like this. Despite my skin being damp and the shelter being so cold, I made no protest.

‘I thought,’ my grandmother said into the silence, as she turned another page in her book, ‘you were out.’

My mother caught my eye and I knew that if I managed not to laugh, I’d get her jam rations for a week.

I laughed anyway and so did she.

Lenni and Forgiveness, Part I

‘DID YOU MISS me?’

Father Arthur let out a scream not befitting an elderly clergyman.

‘Lenni?’

‘I’m back!’

Having leapt to his feet, he stood with his hand on his heart and clambered out of the pew without much grace. Panting as though he were just crossing a marathon