Short Measure, by Dorothy Kemble

An original short story extract set in the twentieth century.

Everybody in Ashby Road knew that Mr Naylor kept things under the counter, the way everybody knew that the pillar box was red. You saw it in the way the doctor’s wife came out of the shop with her basket covered by a tea towel, and in the way Mr Naylor called her ‘madam’ and the rest of us ‘dear’.

I was twenty-six that winter, with my husband on a minesweeper somewhere off Iceland and a boy of four who had never tasted a banana. I had my ration book and my principles, and I am ashamed to say I was prouder of the second than I had any right to be.

One Saturday in January I stood in his queue for forty minutes and reached the counter to be told that the tinned milk had all gone. Behind me, Mrs Dacey, who was seventy and had a cough you could hear across the street, had been standing longer than I had.

‘All gone, Mr Naylor?’ I said, loudly enough for the queue. ‘Or all gone to the people who matter?’

He went a dull red from the collar up. ‘I don’t know what you’re suggesting, Mrs Hale.’

‘I’m suggesting there’s a war on for all of us. Not just for the ones who can pay over the odds.’

Somebody at the back of the queue said ‘Hear, hear,’ quietly. Mrs Dacey touched my arm. I walked home with my empty basket feeling as though I had won something.

Peter’s birthday was the following Thursday. I had saved the sugar for a month and it made a cake about the size of a saucer, with no icing. I could not get candles anywhere in the town. On the Wednesday evening I walked down to Ashby Road again to see if the paper shop had any, and as I passed the grocer’s the door opened and Mr Naylor put his head out.

‘Mrs Hale. A minute.’

I went in because I could not think how not to. The blinds were down. He reached under the counter and put two things on it: a tin of peaches with a bright label, and a twist of blue paper which I knew, without asking, held candles.

‘For the lad,’ he said. ‘Five, isn’t he? My Brian was five once.’ He did not say what had happened to his Brian, and I did not ask. ‘No coupons. No questions. And not a word on this road.’

I should have pushed them back across the counter. I had stood in his shop four days before and lectured him about fairness in front of half the street. Instead I said thank you, and I put the tin in my coat pocket, where it pulled the whole coat crooked, and I walked out into the blackout with my hand over it.

On the corner I met Mrs Dacey, coming back from chapel. She asked how I was keeping and whether the boy was well, and coughed, and said she had been thinking of me since Saturday. ‘You said what we all thought, love,’ she said. ‘Somebody had to.’

I said goodnight to her with my hand still over my pocket.

Peter had the peaches on the Thursday, in the good glass dish, with five candles stuck in the little cake beside them. He asked where they had come from. I told him a kind man had given them to us, which was true, and I made myself eat my share, because it seemed to me that if I was going to do it, I had better do it properly.

“The narrator is presented as a woman with stronger principles than Mr Naylor.”

To what extent do you agree with this view?

You should write about:

• your thoughts and feelings about how the narrator is presented in the extract
• how the writer has created these thoughts and feelings

You must refer to the language used in the text to support your answer.