‘Norm, you know what you said tonight, about us getting our own house?’

‘Huh, yeah. Pigs might fly.’

‘But d’you want us to get our own place – really?’ Sometimes she thought he’d be just as happy living here forever with his mom.

‘Well, yes, course. But you know what it’s like.’

‘But if we really tried – there must be places to rent if we looked around. If we tried a bit harder.’

‘Oh, I dunno,’ Norm said fatalistically. He gave a huge yawn. ‘We’re on the council list. I don’t know there’s much else we can do about it.’

Em lay back, suddenly burning with determination. ‘But if we tried,’ she insisted. She could tell Norm was almost asleep. Norm nearly always seemed to go to sleep whenever she wanted to talk about anything.

‘Night, love.’ He patted her haunch and turned on his side, soon dead to the world.

Well, you may not be prepared to try and make it happen, but I’ve had enough, she thought. I don’t want to go on like this, so something’s got to change!

Forty-Two

Em’s determination to try and find a new place to live unfortunately could not overrule the reality – that there was nowhere to be had. The odd room would come up for rent, but precious little else. The bombing had destroyed many houses, and others were rotting away of their own accord. Families anxious to settle after the years of war were having babies at a rate of knots, and many were in her position, crammed in with parents and in-laws, or even living in old prisoner-of-war camps or disused railway carriages. There was simply not enough to go round. The council had tens of thousands on the waiting list. The newspapers talked about slum clearance.

Bob, her dad, kept saying, ‘They’ll have this place down, then – you wait and see.’

‘We’re not living in a slum, Bob!’ Cynthia would protest crossly. ‘I’ve always kept our house nice.’

There was much talk by the city planners, but the action was very slow. Set against all this, Em felt guilty.

‘It’s not so bad where you are,’ another young mother reproached her, when she talked about her longing to find somewhere else. ‘You don’t even have the babby sleeping in with you – that’s flaming luxury, that is! Some people don’t know when they’re well off.’

It was true, Em thought. There were so many worse off – and Edna’s house was clean into the bargain. And it wasn’t as if Edna was a tyrant, like some. Em felt almost ashamed of her sense of frustration. After those war years, married but stuck at home with Mom and Dad, was it asking too much to hope for a married life where she could run her own house and be in charge of her own kitchen?

‘What about one of them prefab places?’ she said to Norm one night, once they were alone. ‘They look quite nice.’