The Girls They Left Behind (38 page)

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Authors: Lilian Harry

Tags: #Fiction, #Sagas

BOOK: The Girls They Left Behind
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‘Do you tell me everything?’ she asked, and was surprised to see him flush in his turn.

There was a brief silence. Then Betty touched his sleeve gently.

‘Don’t let’s quarrel, Graham. It’s the first time we’ve seen each other for weeks. We ought to be happy.’

‘That’s what I want.’ He pulled her roughly against him.

‘That’s what I thought it’d be like. But you seem different.

You’re harder. You’ve got more selfish ‘

She sighed. ‘I haven’t got more selfish, Graham. I’ve just had to grow up a bit, that’s all. Life’s changed for me. I’ve been living away from home, I’ve had to make up my own mind about things. I’m bound to seem a bit different. You’re different, too.’

‘I’m a man,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to go away. But you’re a woman, you’re supposed to stop at home.’

‘It’s wartime. That sort of thing isn’t true any more.’

‘Well, it bloody ought to be!’ he exclaimed, losing his temper again. ‘For Christ’s sake, Betty, isn’t there anything you could do at home? Knit balaclava helmets, or work in the canteen like my mum does, or something like that? Do you have to go miles away and wallow about in the mud?’

‘No, I don’t have to. But I want to.’ She looked at him, her head on one side, trying to make him smile. ‘Can you see me knitting balaclava helmets or making cauldrons of soup, Graham? Can you honestly?’

‘I don’t see why not. Plenty of other people do. Oh hell, you can do what you like, so long as you’re here. Don’t you understand?’

Betty moved her eyes slowly over his face, taking in the ginger hair, the sandy eyebrows and freckled face. The merriment she had once found so attractive had vanished, leaving his mouth petulant and his eyes sulky. She thought of his mother, jolly and untidy, letting the whole house revolve around her son.

‘The trouble with you, Graham, is you’re spoilt,’ she said.

‘You think everything’s got to be arranged to suit you. You don’t seem to think I’m entitled to a life of my own at all, it’s all got to be organised so that I’m here when you want me, doing the things you want me to do. You think you own me, and you want to get married so that you can own me all the more.’

‘That’s stupid. I don’t want to own you. I just want to know you’re my wife.’

‘And if I was?’ she said. ‘Would you let me go on working on the farm?’

‘Well, of course not! I’d want you back here, behaving like a wife should. Haven’t I already said so?’

‘Yes, you have,’ Betty said. ‘I just wanted to make sure I’d heard you properly. I’m sorry, Graham, but I don’t want to give up my life like that. I’m enjoying being on the farm. I’m doing something worthwhile there. I’m not prepared to give it all up and come back here and knit.’

‘You don’t have to knit. You could go back to the dairy.’

‘Thank you very much. I left the dairy, remember?’ She looked at him. She hadn’t wanted to hurt him, but she was wondering now just how much he really did love her. Wasn’t it just his own idea of himself he loved? ‘Graham, I’m sorry, but I don’t think this is going to work.’ She pulled the chain which held her ring from inside her blouse. ‘You’d better have this back.’

He stared at the ring, with its tiny glittering stone. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Us being engaged. It isn’t working.’

‘It isn’t getting a chance to work!’ he shouted. ‘You’re not giving it a chance. Look, I’ve been back five minutes, all I wanted to do was hold you in my arms and kiss you and love you, all the things a bloke wants to do when he gets back home with his girl. But you don’t seem to care any more.’ He was holding her tightly, rubbing his cheek against hers, covering her face with kisses. He put his hand over her breast and squeezed it. ‘Last time I was home, you said you’d let me love you properly, and then you never did. Don’t you realise how I’ve been feeling? Don’t you realise what it’s been like? And all I wanted, all I’ve ever wanted ‘

‘Graham, stop it! You’ll have Mum in here, making all that noise.’ Betty pulled away and sat panting, her hair dishevelled, her blouse half out of her skirt. ‘I’m sorry it doesn’t seem the same. I’m sorry. But I can’t help it. I can’t let you do what you want. I don’t want to get caught ‘

‘I’ve told you it doesn’t matter. We’ll get married. They’ll have to let us get married.’

‘And I’ve told you it does matter! I won’t do it that way, Graham, and the way you’ve been going on tonight I don’t think I want to do it at all.’

He stared at her, bewildered. ‘What way I’ve been going on? All I’ve wanted ‘

‘All you want is to get me tied down,’ she said. ‘You don’t give a damn what I want. I’m to live my life the way you want me to live it, which is sitting at home night after night doing sweet Fanny Adams, just on the off-chance that you’ll show up. Well, I won’t. I’d be bored stiff.’

‘Not if you had a baby,’ he said. ‘You’d have plenty to do if you had a baby to look after.’

‘But I don’t want a baby! Not yet. Not for years. And I’m certainly not having one just so my mum and dad’ll have to let us get married. They’d never forgive me. They probably wouldn’t ever speak to me again.’

‘Well, that’s all right,’ he said. ‘There needn’t be one, not really. We can tell ‘em it was all a mistake, or you could say you’d had a miss ‘

‘Tell lies about it?’ Betty stared at him. ‘You’d want me to tell lies, just so we could get married and you could make me stay at home and knit woolly hats? Is that really what you want me to do? Never mind that it’d break my mum’s heart and Dad would probably turn me out.’

‘You could go and stay with my mum. In fact, it’d probably be better that way. I wouldn’t have to ‘

‘You wouldn’t have to come up this way at all when the ship was in Pompey,’ she finished for him. ‘You don’t understand anything at all, do you? You just want the whole world to revolve around you.’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Betty’

‘And you needn’t bring your language here!’ she shouted.

‘Just because you’re in sailor’s uniform you needn’t think you can come here laying down the law and swearing ‘

‘Look, I’m asking you to marry me, that’s all! What’s so bloody wrong with that? Most girls want to get married, don’t they? They want to have kids. You’re bloody unnatural, you are. I just want to love you, like any bloke wants to love his girl, I don’t see anything so criminal about that. And you’d want it too, if you really loved me. You’d want to marry me and be my wife.’

‘Well, I don’t want to,’ she said flatly. ‘I don’t want to be anyone’s wife, if that’s what it’s all about. I’d rather live an old maid.’

‘And that’s what you’ll be,’ he sneered. ‘Because I can tell you this, Betty, nobody else is going to want you, with your face getting all lined and weatherbeaten, and your hands like sandpaper, and muscles like a Shall I tell you something else? You don’t know how to be a proper woman.

You never did. You always wanted to be a boy, out in the street playing football and cricket. And you’re no different now.

That’s why you won’t let me touch you, you’ve got no proper feelings at all. I reckon there’s something wrong with you!’

He came to his feet and stood glowering down at her. Betty sat quite still, shaken by his words, wanting to refute them but too overcome by her own guilt to hurl back any more accusations. Her eyes filled with tears and Graham saw and seized upon them.

‘That’s right, start piping your eye. Isn’t that what girls always do, when they start to lose an argument? Well, cry all you like, Betty, it won’t bring me back. I’ve had enough of your prim and prissy ways and I’ve had enough of waiting for you to finish the milking before you can spare me a minute or two of your precious time. I’m off!’

‘Graham, don’t go like that ‘

‘And how do you want me to go?’ he demanded, wrenching open the door. ‘In a Rolls-Royce? Or maybe on a carthorse, like you’re used to?’

‘I didn’t mean that. You know I didn’t. I just -‘ She gazed helplessly at him, unable to express what she was feeling.

‘Graham, we’ve had some good times together. Can’t we still be friends?’

‘Oh yes,’ he said bitterly, ‘that’s the next line, isn’t it? Let’s stay friends. They all say that, in the “Dear Johns”. I can’t love you any more, there’s this other man who’s the love of my life, but let’s stay friends. Friends! Who wants to be friends? Being friends doesn’t get you anywhere.’

‘If you think that,’ Betty said, ‘I’m sorry for you. Really sorry.’ She stood up. Her knees were shaking but she tilted her chin and looked him in the eye. ‘I didn’t mean it to be this way, Graham. But I don’t see what else we can do. Thanks for the good times, anyway.’

He stared at her, baffled. Then he swung on his heel and wrenched open the door. In another moment, he was out on the street, the front door crashing behind him.

Betty stood quite still. She put her hands up to cover her face, feeling the tears overflow from her eyes to fill her palms and squeeze slowly out through her fingers.

I really didn’t mean it to be like that, she thought. I meant it to be gentle. I didn’t want all that argument and bitterness.

But perhaps she’d been fooling herself. Perhaps you couldn’t, after all, break up with someone without pain and bitterness. Perhaps Graham was right, and it was impossible to stay ‘friends’.

From the other room, she could hear the voices of Olive and her parents. It was almost supper-time. They’d be expecting her and Graham to come through at any minute.

She heard her mother knock on the door and took a deep breath, preparing herself to go through and tell them that Graham wasn’t, after all, staying to supper.

Chapter Sixteen

The news from London was worse each day. It became a dreadful commonplace to pass dead bodies in the street, and even small children developed a casual indifference.

‘That’s our baker. He’s lost his hat.’

‘I wonder who’ll get his horse…’

Huge craters appeared in the roads, and cars, taxis and trolley buses were reduced to smashed wrecks of twisted metal. So many London buses were destroyed that the city appealed for help from other towns, and the streets were suddenly brightened by buses of all colours, taking the place of the familiar red.

The blitz was spreading to other cities. In November the Germans attacked some of Britain’s most famous cathedral cities. Nine days later they tore the heart from Coventry in one of the worst raids yet, nearly five hundred bombers, dropping over five hundred tons of high-explosive bombs and nearly a thousand incendiaries. And before the nation could draw breath, they were back again, hurling an apparently inexhaustible supply of red-hot fury at the capital city.

‘It’s coming closer,‘Jess said, sitting in the air-raid shelter and listening to the planes passing overhead. ‘It’ll be our turn soon.’

Southampton was next. Only three days after the crushing of Coventry, the planes were thundering up the Solent and over the docks which had sheltered some of Britain’s most famous ocean liners. A week later they came again, and then again. The flames could be seen for miles around, lighting the sky all night.

 

They could be seen from Bridge End, where the Budd children and their friends were evacuated. Tim and Keith watched from their bedroom window, excited and only half afraid, while their sister Rose stared in panic, imagining it happening to Portsmouth, imagining her parents and baby sister Maureen, burning alive in the holocaust.

‘It’s all right, love. It’s not Portsmouth. Your mum and dad are all right,’ Mrs Greenberry tried to comfort her. But Rose shook her head, her eyes fixed on the brilliant glow.

‘They’ll go to Portsmouth as well. I know they will. They keep on getting raids there.’

Mrs Greenberry held her against her bosom and sighed.

What could she say to the girl? Rose wasn’t a child any more, she was thirteen years old and intelligent enough to know what was happening. You couldn’t tell her everything would be all right, when you knew it wasn’t true. Nothing was all right.

‘We’ll just have to trust God to look after them,’ she said.

‘He knows they’re there, Rose. He’ll take care of them.’

But the girl looked up at her, her brown eyes dark with despair.

‘Why should he? He’s letting other people be killed. He’s not looking after them.’

And there wasn’t anything you could say to that either. She could only go on holding Rose tight and stay with her, watching the fires that raged over Southampton, thinking of London and of Coventry and waiting for the same thing to happen to Portsmouth.

It began only a few days later, when Portsmouth suffered what was described as ‘the most violent attack yet carried out by the Luftwaffe’. Hospitals and cinemas were damaged, property destroyed and fires started all over the city. Gladys, still nervously learning to handle an ambulance, found herself racing along crumbling streets, her way lit by flames, while her mother crouched in the back trying to staunch the bleeding of terrified victims.

‘Oh God, it’s awful, it’s awful,’ she kept repeating to herself. ‘I can’t stand it. I’ll go mad. I can’t stand it.’ But there was no time to give in, and it had to be withstood, for there were people dying and only she and Peggy and a few others to help them in a world that had gone sickeningly mad.

For many, there was no help. They lay buried beneath huge heaps of shattered brick and plaster, pinned down by heavy beams of wood and concrete, blood and breath slowly crushed from their smashed bodies, and they died with the taste of the dust and smoke filling their lungs, and the screams of other victims in their ears.

And in the midst of it all, Kathy Simmons, huddling in the damp little Anderson shelter with her two small daughters, went into labour.

She had been feeling strange all day. Yesterday the baby, which had been riding high, had begun a frenzied burst of activity. It seemed to be kicking itself down her body, like a swimmer diving energetically to the bottom of the sea. Her shape changed by the hour, until the bulge was lying low on her thighs and she felt exhausted.

She called the midwife, but after an examination Mrs Frame told her that she didn’t think there was any hurry. ‘You say the other two took a long time. I don’t reckon this un’ll be born for a day or two yet. Head’s not properly engaged, see, and nothing can happen till it is. You just get some rest and I’ll look in again tomorrow.’

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