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thought, surely, surely there’s got to be more to existence than slaving your fingers to the bone all your life and then dropping dead in a pawn shop and no one really caring whether you do or not?
    The thought of Mom in a soggy heap was too much for me straight after work so I went to my nan’s, which felt just as much like home. I knew I could tell her about Mrs Wiles passing on in front of me and she’d listen.
    Belgrave Road was a wide, main street sloping down from the Moseley Road to the Bristol Road. Nan lived almost at the top, had done for years, in one of the yards down an entry behind the shops. As you went down the hill the houses gradually got bigger and bigger and at the bottom end there were some really posh ones. Nanny Rawson started her working life in one of those, in service to a family called the Spiegels, soon after the turn of the century. She didn’t get paid in money, they gave her bits of clothes and food instead. She’d lived in three different houses in Belgrave Road, and, as Mom was forever reminding us, Nan brought up her three surviving children at about the same level of poverty as everyone else in the back-to-back courts of houses. Poor as grinding poor back then, after the Great War, not knowing from one day to the next if my grandad would be in work or out of it, drunk or sober. Their clothes shop was the heap tipped out in the yard by the rag and bone man.
    ‘We couldn’t shop three days ahead in them days,’ Mom’d say (oh, here we go). ‘It was hand to mouth. Your grandad was out of work and your nan in the factory, until she got that shop . . . You got an ounce of jam at a time in a cup, if you was lucky. Your nan was up in the brew’us at five in the morning doing other people’s washing to make ends meet.’ Mom’d never forget it, scrubbing at the top of shoes with barely any soles on them, never knowing a full stomach, coats on the bed and the house lousy and falling down round their ears. Nan had struggled to give her kids better and Mom knew to hold on tight to what she’d got.
    The road was full of the smell of hops from Dare’s Brewery and the whiff of sawn wood from the timber merchant’s down opposite Hick Street. On the corner stood the Belgrave Hotel, and Nan’s huckster’s shop was across the road with a cobbled entry running along the side of it which ran into the yard. The shop’s windows had advertisements stuck to them for Brasso, Cadbury’s, Vimto and such a collection of others that you could hardly see in or out. Her house, which backed on to the shop, was attic-high – three floors, one room on each, and in the downstairs you could walk through the scullery, lift up a little wooden counter and you were in the shop.
    I was almost there when Nan’s shop door flew open, bell jangling like mad, and two girls tumbled out shrieking and spitting like cats. One had a heap of blond hair and long, spindly legs pushed into a pair of ankle-wobbling high black patent heels. The other had crimpy red hair and a skin-tight skirt, scarlet with big white polka dots, and showing a mass of mottled leg.
    ‘You mardy old bitch!’ the blonde yelled into the shop at the top of her lungs. As she did so, she caught her heel in the brick pavement and fell over backwards, white legs waving. ‘Now look what you’ve made me do, you fucking cow!’
    The redhead was helping her up. ‘You wanna watch it – we can have you seen to, grandma . . .’
    Nanny Rawson loomed in the doorway, enormous in her flowery pinner crossed over at the back, face grimmer than a storm at sea. Bandaged leg or no, she was out of that door in a jiffy, giving the redhead a whopping clout round the face that nearly floored her. The girl set up a train-whistle shriek, as much from wounded pride as from pain, which brought people out of the shops to stare and grin.
    ‘All right, Edith?’ someone shouted. ‘That’s right – you give ’em one!’ Nanny Rawson ignored them.
    ‘Get this