‘That’s it Joycie,’ Em was jumping up and down, clapping her hands with excitement. ‘You can do it!’
Her four year old sister Joyce was hopping along the wonky grid chalked on the pavement, the tip of her tongue sticking out and her eyes fixed on her feet in her eagerness to get it right. A pale blue ribbon bounced up and down in her hair as she hopped, avoiding the third square with the stone in it, into square two, then square one, and finally, beaming like a cheeky angel, fell into Em’s waiting arms.
‘I done it, Em! I can do it!’
Em laughed in delight at the sight of her little sister’s face, quite similar to her own. though Joyce’s face was pudgier like a puppy’s, and without Em’s sprinkling of freckles across the nose. But they both had the same bobbed brown hair and fringe, regularly chopped by their mother, Cynthia. ‘I never said I was born to be a hair dresser,’ she’d say, snipping the scissors across.
‘You done it Joycie. Told you I’d teach you, didn’ I?’
It was August, and the sound of playing children, their voices and laughter could be heard all along the street. A gaggle of kids squatted over pocketfuls of marbles, there were lads swinging from ropes on the lamp posts and three of them prodding the metal rim of a cycle wheel, cajoling it along the road in a sinuous course. And all across the pavements was smudged evidence of the latest craze: chalked hopscotch grids where boys and girls, but mostly girls, went skip-hopping up and down them while the tired, sooty bricks of terraced houses seemed to smile down on them in the broiling afternoon sun.
'My turn again!’ Joyce was shouting ecstatically, when a commanding cry cut through all the chatter and of the street.
‘Em! Emma Brown. Get in ‘ere quick bab – your Mom needs yer!’
'Dot’s calling,’ Joyce said, unnecessarily, because when Mom’s best pal Dot Wiggins opened her mouth to shout, the whole street could always hear her. And they could see Dot’s dark-haired, rangy figure waving her arms at them from their front door.
‘Gotta go!’ Em called to her friends. ‘C’mon Joycie.’
They dashed along past other women in the street who were settled on their front steps or on broken-backed chairs, gossiping and peeling spuds or shelling peas into their aprons, escaping the heat of all the cooking ranges blasting away indoors.
‘She ‘aving it?’ One of them yelled down to Dot.
‘Looks like it!’
‘Rather ‘er than me!’ A ripple of sympathetic laughter ran along the street.
Em ran into number 18, Kenilworth Street, still clutching Joyce’s hand. It was dark inside after the bright outdoors, but already Em could hear her mother’s gasps of pain.