The Woman Who Kept Everything. Jane Gilley

seeing each other. He’d walk her home from school or she’d drag Jocelyn along to watch him play footie at weekends. At one point, though, she nearly fell out with Jocelyn who also said she fancied him.

      However, Tilsbury then went to India with his family for a good few years because his father was a rail track engineer. When they all came back he took up with Gloria again but couldn’t settle and didn’t seem to know what he wanted out of life. He decided to leave Norwich in his late teens to ‘find out what I want to do’, he said.

      So Gloria had decided to forget about him and move on with her life. Mabel got married and had children, early on, to Gerard – a boy-next-door type – and Jocelyn and Gloria got jobs as secretaries and enjoyed themselves as single young women. Eventually Gloria got together with Arthur, a reliable and honourable young man who worked for a manufacturing company and was liked by everyone. She met him at a barn dance.

      When Tilsbury returned to the area after his travels around the country he married Jocelyn, much to Gloria’s surprise. In those early days it did cause a bit of a rift between them all. Jocelyn hadn’t dared tell Gloria who she was going out with at first. ‘Well, you were with Arthur. And it just ’appened!’ she ruefully admitted to Gloria, later. But they’d been good friends and the rift healed, eventually, and they resumed a friendship of sorts. Besides Gloria had her life with Arthur and they had their young son, Clegg, and they were very happy.

      And then many years later, Tilsbury started dropping by every few weeks, helping Gloria out with errands or a bit of DIY, when her husband Arthur died, in the Nineties. But it tickled Gloria to think that Tilsbury had always been sweet on her.

      ‘Just keeping an eye out for you, old girl,’ he’d say.

      ‘I’m middle-aged, you oaf, not ancient yet! Besides I don’t need you always fussing round me,’ she’d told him, huffily. ‘Go fuss round your own family.’

       What family?

      His estranged wife Jocelyn had shooed him out of their cramped council house, years earlier, after he’d tripped over another one of her flippin’ rescue cats. She swore he’d kicked it. He hadn’t! He’d said the house felt overcrowded – not because they’d ever had kids but because there’d been a constant flow of ruddy cats in the place, nineteen at last count. Some had bits missing from their ears; one had no ears. Some were flea-ridden; some pregnant or scrawny. And there was fur and faeces trays everywhere. Meow, meow, meow, all day long, and then howling at night. It annoyed the neighbours; it drove him crazy. It was a bloody madhouse. Anyway, Jocelyn – in no uncertain terms – told him to leave but he knew he was best off out of it.

      ‘I’m gone,’ were his last words as he left without a final nod to his wife.

      So Tilsbury dossed in the park when it was warm enough and bagged a bed wherever he could the rest of the time – mainly at the shelter, occasionally at his sister’s or with friends. His life remained like that for quite a while. No responsibility for anyone or anything was how he decided he liked it best.

      However, Tilsbury was thoroughly annoyed when Jocelyn moved on – and with his brother, Marvin, to boot! Previously they’d all been good friends, in the same clique. Miffed, Tilsbury had, on occasion, slipped into their house, when he knew they were safely down the dogs and nicked a bit of their rent money or topped up his hip flask with their vodka. He justified it by thinking it was the very least they could do after the way they’d treated him. And it kept him going each month when funds and sympathy were tight.

      Besides, he reasoned, why would they always leave their spare key in the same place? It was his old hiding spot and they knew he was still around.

      And – oh, yes – they’d always gotten mad with him, if they caught him when they got back, especially if he was making a sandwich or having a cup of tea. But a ‘Piss off, bruv’ from Marvin usually sent him scampering.

      But finally, after years of Tilsbury’s periodic comings and goings and helping her out at her own house, Gloria felt sorry for him and said he could stay at hers, on those occasions when he didn’t otherwise have anywhere else to go.

      ‘Right now, my dear. If you wants to kip here for the night, whenever you needs to, you can. But it won’t be first class at the Hilton, you understand, because you might just notice I’m not too fussy about me housekeepin’. Ha, ha. Now the downside is that the only bit of room I’ve got free is right here in the hall. If we shift these boxes a bit more towards the kitchen, you can squeeze in down there.’

      So Tilsbury had rooted around upstairs and found a couple of blankets and plonked them on the floor over a wodge of newspapers. Reckoned it kept him warm enough, the nights he stayed – even in the winter – and so they got on like that.

      Gloria often told Tilsbury she wished she’d got a house with ‘all mod cons’ like she’d seen on the telly – when she’d had a telly. Well, she still had a telly but she wasn’t quite sure where it was now. Least there wasn’t the darned licence to pay for any more.

      Anyway, she knew her television was somewhere in the room that used to be a lounge. And it probably still was a lounge under all the masses of stuff in there. But there were masses of stuff everywhere, now. It rose up around her like huge towers, locking her in. It made her feel safe. But Gloria certainly knew – oh, she could see – that her house was a humongous mess. But she had neither the strength nor resolve to even begin the colossal task of sorting it all out now.

      ‘Too late for all that, dearie,’ she’d say when someone made a derogatory comment. ‘It has to stay in here, ducks! Where else can it all go?’

       Chapter 2

      Even though Gloria realised what a state her house was in, she’d felt very blessed and privileged that her real family had left her this house. What a bonus! Number 75 Briar Way handed to her on a plate, it was. And no siblings to share it with either; just Arthur, when he was alive. It had been fantastic being able to escape the constant struggle to find money, each month, for their council tenancy. Getting their own real, proper house was like a dream come true for them.

      ‘And one less chuffin’ worry,’ Arthur used to say.

      She recalled how her real ma and pa had left her the house. Well, actually, her grandmother had left it to her. She’d gotten a letter from her grandmother’s solicitor, years ago, along with the deeds to her house. She and Arthur were living in a scantily furnished council house, with their young son, whilst they tried to save up for better things. The letter also explained why she’d been given up for adoption.

       Hello my darling Gloria,

       Let me introduce myself. I am your grandmother, Barbara, and the purpose of my letter today is to explain some things for you.

       I’m leaving my house to you in my Will on my death. As well as my house – which would have fallen to your parents on my death, and then to yourself, anyway – I wish to explain why you were not brought up by myself, following the untimely deaths of your beloved parents. I have also enclosed a couple of photographs: one of myself at a party and one of your parents’ wedding, outside the church. That’s me to the right of your mother.

       Anyway, when you were a baby, the bombs started dropping on Britain at the outbreak of World War II. Your father, Walter, was working in the mustard factory and your mother – my only daughter, Emily – was a domestic cleaner. They were living with me in my house, whilst they saved up for their own family home. But en route to a rare evening out with friends, they both died tragically, in a bombing raid in Norwich, in July of 1940.

      A couple of earlier bombing sessions had struck buildings and there’d been no fatalities. But on that particular night there’d been no air raid warning, either, as there sometimes wasn’t, and a lot of other mustard factory workers lost their lives that night too.