The Dressmaker of Dachau

Author:Mary Chamberlain
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007591541
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2015-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

TWO

London, July 1945

Ada sat in the Ladies Only compartment of the train, staring at the peppered mirror opposite and the advertisements for Eastbourne and Bexhill-on-Sea, poster-blue skies and bright yellow sands. Southern Railways. The train was dirty, the windows thick with sooty smuts. She smiled at the other women with their curled sandwiches in greaseproof paper. Fish paste. Liver paste. Pilchards. The young lady from the Women’s Voluntary Service, a comely figure in green uniform and pink lipstick, had given them the sandwiches when they climbed on board. It was a long time since Ada had seen someone like that, someone womanly. She ran her hand down the hollows of her body. She went in where she should have gone out. No bosom. No hips. She was fatter than she had been before, thanks to Sister Brigitte, but she could still count her ribs. The other women in the carriage were thin too, all DBS’s like her. Distressed British Subjects. That’s what they called them. She thought she’d been a prisoner or an internee. That, at least, gave her a character, a persona with a past, after all these years. But a DBS? Who was that?

Home. Should she knock? Open the door and walk right in? Hello. Only me. It’s our Ada. She’s back. Cissie, her sister. She was eleven when Ada left. She’d be a young woman now. Out at work. Their big sister, safely home. All together again. Alf and Fred, Bill and Gladys, Mum and Dad. Sitting in that kitchen, warm from the range and steamy from the washing draped to dry. Ada, love, put the kettle on. Let’s have a cup of tea. Maybe Dad would send Fred to the pub for a jug of stout. Good to have you back, girl. Mum fussing. Neck of lamb from O’Connor’s. Pearl barley. Dumplings. You could do with some weight, bit of feeding up.

Ada rubbed the window with her cuff but the dirt was on the outside and it was difficult to see through. They shunted through dilapidated towns and dog-eared villages. England was poorer than she remembered. The fields in between the towns flared ochre and green in the bright July sun, glowed with life and colour. There were woodlands, heavy oaks and beech and more houses. Suburbs. Chuggety-chug, semi-detached houses covered in pebbledash. Chuggety-chug through allotments and gardens with bean frames and early potatoes. Mum had always wanted to move to a place like this. Purley. Purley Oaks. Sanderstead. Her friend Blanche had moved to the suburbs. Petit bourgeois, Dad had said. Nobody lives in Purley.

The train was down to a dawdle. Balham. Clapham Junction. This was London? Whole streets gone, nothing but empty façades and lopsided walls. Anxiety began to scratch at her gut. Ada pressed her nose against the glass. Some of the ruins had been fenced off and displayed clumsy notices Keep Off and Danger. She could see children climbing through the stones, holding their fingers like guns. Bang bang. Battersea, the power station still standing.

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