Mister God, This is Anna. Papas

the middle of all the giggles there was a thump, thump, thump on the wall. That was Mum’s signal. ‘That you? Your supper’s in the oven and don’t forget to turn the gas off.’

      Instead of the usual, ‘OK, Mum, won’t be long’, this night I opened the door and yelled down the passage, ‘Mum, come and see what I’ve got.’

      One thing about Mum, she was never fussed about anything, she took everything in her stride. Bossy, the cat I brought home one night, and Patch the dog, eighteen-year-old Carol, who stayed with us for two years, and Danny from Canada, who stayed about three years. Some people collect stamps or beer-mats; Mum collected waifs and strays, cats, dogs, frogs, people and, as she believed, a whole host of ‘little people’. Had she been confronted that night with a lion she’d have made the same comment – ‘The poor thing.’ One look when she came through the door was enough. ‘The poor thing,’ she cried, ‘what have they done to you?’ And then, as an afterthought, to me, ‘You look a right mess. Wash your face.’ With that, Mum flopped on to her knees and put her arms around Anna.

      Being embraced by Mum was like tangling with a gorilla. Mum had arms like other people have legs. Mum had a unique anatomical structure which still puzzles me, for she had a fourteen-stone heart in a twelve-stone body. Mum was a real lady and wherever she may be now she’ll still be a lady.

      A few minutes of ‘ooh’s’ and ‘aah’s’, then things began to get organized. Mum heaved herself upright, and with a passing shot to me to ‘get those wet clothes off the child’, flung open the kitchen door, yelling, ‘Stan, Carol, come here quick!’ Stan’s my younger brother by two years; Carol was one of the waifs or strays that came and went.

      The kitchen and the scullery suddenly erupted – a bath appeared, kettles of water on gas-rings, towels, soap; the kitchen-range was filled with coal; and there was me trying to undo sundry hooks and eyes on Anna’s clothing. And suddenly there she was, sitting cross-legged on the table as raw as the day she was born. Stan said ‘Bastard!’ Carol said ‘Christ!’ Mum looked a bit grim. For a moment that little kitchen blazed with hatred for someone; that poor little body was bruised and sore. The four older people in the kitchen were ready to bash someone and for a time we were lost in our own anger. But Anna sat and grinned, a huge face-splitting grin. Like some beautiful sprite she sat there, and I believe for the very first time in her life she was entirely and completely happy.

      The bath completed, the soup downed and Anna resplendent in Stan’s old shirt, we all sat around the kitchen table and took stock of the situation. Questions were asked but no answers were forthcoming. We eventually decided that the day had had enough questions asked. The answers could wait until tomorrow. While Mum went to work getting Anna’s clothes clean again, Stan and I made up a bed on an old black leather sofa next door to me.

      I slept in the front room, a room stuffed full of aspidistras, a tall-boy with the precious pieces of cut glass displayed on the top, one bed, and sundry bits and pieces scattered around. My room was separated off from the next room by a large baize curtain hung on big wooden rings that slid back and forth with their clack, clack, clack. Behind the curtain was Anna’s sofa-bed. Outside my bedroom window was a street lamp and as the window was only covered by lace curtains the bedroom was always well lit. As I said, our house was right next to the railway, with trains passing all day and all night, but you got used to that. In fact after nineteen years the rumble and rush of the passing trains was more of a lullaby than a noise.

      When the bed had been made and all the night preparation attended to, I went back into the kitchen again. There was the little imp enthroned in a cane chair, swaddled in blankets, drinking a cup of hot cocoa. Bossy was sitting on her lap giving a fair imitation of Houdini trying to wriggle out of a strait-jacket, and Patch at her feet, beating time with his tail on the floor. The hiss of the gas-lamp, the bright firelight, the little pools of water on the floor, all turned that little kitchen into a Christmas scene. The Welsh dresser, the shining pots and the black-leaded kitchen-range, with its brass fire-irons and guard, seemed to sparkle. In the midst of it all sat the little princess, clean and shining. This little thing had the most splendid, the most beautiful, copper-coloured hair imaginable, and a face to match. No painted cherub on some church ceiling was this child, but a smiling, giggling, squirming, real live child, her face alight with some inner radiance, her eyes like two blue searchlights.

      Earlier in the evening I had said ‘Yes’ to her question, ‘You love me, don’t you?’ because I was unable to say ‘No’. Now I was glad that I had been unable to say ‘No’, for the answer was ‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’ How could anyone fail to love this little thing?

      Mum gave a bit of a grunt and her usual ‘Well, we had better get to bed or we won’t be worth anything tomorrow.’ And so I picked up Anna and took her along to her bed. The bedclothes were already pulled back and I put her down and made as if to tuck her up, but this was all wrong.

      ‘Ain’t you gonna say your prayers?’ she asked.

      ‘Well, yes,’ I replied, ‘when I get to bed.’

      ‘I want to say mine now with you,’ she said. So we both got down on our knees and she talked while I listened.

      I’ve been to church many times, and heard many prayers, but none like this. I can’t remember much about her prayer except that it started off with ‘Dear Mister God, this is Anna talking’, and she went on in such a familiar way of talking to Mister God that I had the creepy feeling that if I dared look behind me he would be standing there. I remember her saying, ‘Thank you for letting Fynn love me’, and I remember being kissed goodnight, but how I got to bed I don’t know.

      I lay in bed in some confusion wondering what had hit me. The trains rattled on their way, the fog swirled round the street lamp. It may have been an hour that I had lain there, possibly two, when I heard the clack, clack of the curtain rings and there she was standing at the end of my bed quite visible in the lamplight. For a minute or two I lay there thinking that she was just wanting to reassure herself, when she moved around to the head of my bed.

      I said, ‘Hi, Tich!’

      ‘Can I get in?’ she said in a whisper – she didn’t wait for my ‘if you want to’, but slid in beside me and buried her head in my neck and cried silently, her tears warm and wet on my chest. There was nothing to say, nothing to do but to put my arm around her. I didn’t think I would sleep, but I did. I awoke to the sound of stifled giggles, Anna still beside me giggling like a fiend, and Carol, already dressed, standing there giggling, with a morning cup of tea in her hand. All this in less than twelve hours.

       Chapter Two

      During the next few weeks we tried to find out by a bit of cunning questioning where Anna lived. The gentle approach, the sideways approach, the sneeky approach, all proved to be useless. It seemed quite possible that she had just dropped out of heaven. I was ready to believe this to be true, but Stan, being much more practical than me, didn’t agree at all. The only certain thing we knew was that she wasn’t going to no bleeding cop shop. By this time I was sure that I had initiated this idea. After all, you don’t find an orchid and then put it in the cellar. It wasn’t that any of us had anything against the cops, far from it. In those days cops were more like official friends, even if they did clip you round the ear with a glove full of dried peas if they caught you up to any funny stuff. No, as I said, you can’t lock a sunbeam in the dark. Besides, we all wanted her to stay.

      By this time Anna was a firm favourite down our street. Whenever the kids played team-games like four sticks everyone wanted Anna on their side.