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string. She can’t have been much different in age from my nan, but her face looked like an old potato.
    ‘Mrs Johnson wants two shilling for this,’ she said, picking up Mrs Johnson’s bundle of washing.
    Mr Palmer looked her in the eye over his glasses. ‘One and nine.’
    ‘Two shilling. She wants two shilling.’
    ‘One and nine.’
    Every week it was the same, and the look she gave him, I was laughing that much bent over the counter that I could barely write out the tickets.
    ‘Oh you bloody fool,’ she said, screwing up her leathery face. ‘Oh, you old miser.’
    They went through this with every bundle on the barrow. She counted and recounted the coins Mr Palmer gave her, and pushed them into a little pouch which she had tucked into her waistband.
    This was all part of the normal performance. But what wasn’t part of it was that this week she looked a lot more agitated than usual, couldn’t seem to find her waist at all and was pulling at her long skirt as if she thought something might drop out of it. Then she started making funny noises like a guinea pig. Mr Palmer glanced anxiously at me.
    ‘You all right, Mrs Wiles?’ He pulled up the flap in the counter to get through and then just stood there while Mrs Wiles suddenly clutched at her chest, fingers clenched and head back pulling the chicken skin under her chin tight, and then dropped to the floor, pawn tickets fluttering from her.
    ‘Oh Lor’,’ Mr Palmer said, looking down at her. ‘Genie – what do we do?’
    ‘Her pulse.’ I ducked under too and knelt by Mrs Wiles’s slumped body. ‘I’ll feel for her pulse. You go and get help.’
    Mr Palmer charged out of the shop, probably faster than he’d moved in thirty years, and I found myself alone once again with a dead old lady. Because she was dead. I felt the faint pulse flicker, then disappear in her wrist. I folded her hands together over her chest, except one of them kept dropping off. Other customers started coming in.
    ‘What’s Mrs Wiles doing down there?’ the first woman asked.
    ‘She’s dead.’ My knees were shaking.
    ‘Oh you poor kid! Did she just . . .? Where’s Reg Palmer?’
    I shrugged. ‘Gone to get help.’
    By the time Mr Palmer came back with Mrs Palmer, who was fat and usually jolly but not at the moment as someone’d just died, there was quite a crowd in the shop, waiting with their tickets and standing round the walls because Mrs Wiles was taking up such a lot of the floor.
    ‘Her son’s coming,’ Mrs Palmer said after tutting. ‘He’s arranging transport. In the meantime . . .’
    Since we couldn’t leave Mrs Wiles where she was, the Palmers and I stowed her behind the counter. Mrs P found an old sheet on a shelf.
    ‘No one’ll be wanting that back now,’ someone remarked.
    Course, there was barely room to move behind there, and I had to work with one foot on either side of her legs.
    When things had settled down a bit Mr Palmer said, ‘Oi – it’s news time.’ It was ten-thirty. He switched on the wireless.
    The customers in the shop stood stock still as we heard it. Afterwards, everyone was coming in with their lips all in position as they got through the door to say, ‘Have you heard? I suppose you’ll have heard by now?’ It was on everyone’s face. ‘They’ve gone into Poland. The Germans have invaded Poland. We’re for it now.’ One lady was crying. Her son was twenty and she hadn’t forgotten the last war, lost two brothers.
    What about my dad? I wondered. The air crackled with goings on, with nerves. I knew everything was changing and everyone thought it was very serious, that the kerbstones on the Moseley Road had been painted black and white for the blackout, that my brother had been taken from us.
    It wasn’t until the afternoon that Carl Wiles turned up to pick up his mom, and then not with very good grace. I saw Mrs Wiles carted out to his van like a sack of onions. I wondered if anyone had ever really loved her. And I