The Girls They Left Behind (9 page)

The boys wandered alongside, still rather quiet. No, they hadn’t been playing cricket, Tim had said when Jess asked him. No, nor cowboys and indians.

‘So what were you doing all morning?’ she inquired, as they walked through the streets. ‘Hide and seek?’

‘Yes,’ Tim began, but Keith, speaking at the same moment, said a little more brightly, ‘No. We’ve been exploring.’ ‘Exploring?’ Jess repeated, noticing Tim’s scowl. ‘Where were you exploring? You haven’t been too far away, I hope.’ Keith too had seen his brother’s frown and dropped his eyes, saying nothing. His ears had turned red. Jess kept her

gaze fixed on Tim’s face and he glanced up and reddened as

well.

‘Where were you exploring?’ she asked again.

‘Nowhere much,’ Tim said, with a shrug, and she was convinced that they had been doing something they

shouldn’t.

‘Where?’

Tim looked at her. He knew that if he told her the truth he and Keith would be in serious trouble. Worse still, they’d be in trouble with Dad. It was bad enough having Mum cross with them, but if it was something she thought Dad should know about, it meant real punishment. A lot of shouting. Probably the cane.

‘Africa,’ he said, with sudden inspiration. ‘And Australia. That’s where we explored, wasn’t it, Keith?’

Jess looked at them. She knew perfectly well that Tim was evading the truth, and she knew why. She considered insisting, then decided against it. The boys were going away again tomorrow — she didn’t want their last day to be a miserable one.

All the same, she had to try to satisfy her need to know.

‘You haven’t been going down any of the bombed streets, I hope,’ she said. ‘You know what your father would say if you did. It’s dangerous.’

Tim met her eyes so guilelessly that she knew at once that

this was just what they had done.

‘The bombed streets?’ he said. ‘But they’re miles away. We’re not allowed right down there.’

Jess looked into the hazel eyes and sighed. She knew, and Tim knew she knew, that he was lying. I suppose he went down there with that Micky Baxter, she thought, and was glad all over again that her boys would be out in the country again tomorrow, safe from Hitler’s bombs, and away from the influence of the bad boy of April Grove.

Arthur and Mary were just finishing their dinner. They got up, glad to see Jess and the children, and Mary went out to the scullery to put the kettle on.

‘I’ll do that, Mum,’ Jess said. ‘You sit down and have a rest. You must have had a nasty shock last night.’

Her mother fetched a tin of broken biscuits and handed it

to the children. Tim and Keith ran out into the back garden, where Arthur had fixed up a swing from the old apple tree, and Rose went and sat on the step, rocking the pram with one hand.

‘We were a bit shook up’, Mary confessed. ‘But we got ourselves in the shelter and stopped there till it was safe to

come out. We were glad to get our gas masks off, I can tell you!’

Jess couldn’t help smiling at the thought of the two old

people, sitting there in their gas masks, but her amusement was only fleeting. She hadn’t even thought of putting on her and Maureen’s gas masks, and the boys had gone out to play without theirs.

‘They ‘ad gas in the first lot,’ Arthur said in his thin reedy voice. ‘Mustard gas, it was. Cruel stuff. I seen men with their lungs burnt right through their chests with it.’

‘Don’t, Dad,’ Jess begged him, glancing towards the open door. She could hear Tim and Keith calling to each other, and Rose singing softly to the baby. But she knew that he would not be stopped. He seemed to need to go over it all, °vet and over again, as if by doing so he could make some sense of what was happening now.

But there wasn’t any sense to be made, not when you were almost eighty and had already lived through two or three wars, including one that was supposed to end all wars and had failed dismally.

`So what are you going to do about the children?’ Mary asked. ‘You can’t keep them under your eye the whole time.’

‘Oh, they’re going back straightaway,’ Jess said firmly. `Me and Frank have settled that. Tomorrow, we’re taking them. Mr and Mrs Corner wrote saying they’re looking forward to

. having the boys back and I know that nice Mrs Greenberry’ll

take care of Rose. We’re going on the train. I asked Ethel Glaister if she’d like us to take her Shirley along too but no, Bridge End isn’t good enough for her. She’s decided to send Shirley off to America, or Canada.’ Jess sniffed. ‘It’s one extreme or the other with that one. Wouldn’t let her go off with the others last year, thinking nothing was going to

happen, then gets scared silly.’

‘Ethel Glaister was silly already,’ Mary said caustically. She had known Ethel ever since she and Jess had been

neighbours. ‘Still, I’m glad she’s letting Shirley go. It’s daft, keeping kiddies at home these days. There was nowhere for the child to go to school, nobody much to play with. But there, I suppose that’s how Ethel liked it, she always did think she was a cut above the rest of us.’

Tim came racing in.

‘Grandpa, show us your bullets. The ones you got in the last lot.’

Jess flinched. She hated hearing the children use such terms. It seemed so casual, as if the Great War hadn’t mattered. And she didn’t much like her father showing them souvenirs he’d brought back, either —the cartridge cases and empty shells that he’d polished lovingly and set up on the mantelpiece. It was like keeping bones.

‘Come on,’ she said abruptly, getting up. ‘It’s time we went back. I’ve got a lot to do at home. They’re asking us to do half as many sailors’ collars again, and I don’t know where I’m going to find the time, I’m sure I don’t.’

Back in September Street, she let the two boys run on ahead while she and Rose did their own shopping. She went into Atkinson’s, the greengrocer, where Molly Atkinson was weighing out potatoes.

People were still talking about the raid. Some of them were frightened, doing their shopping hastily in order to get home as quickly as possible in case there was another. Some were angry, cursing Hitler and using language that caused Molly to speak sharply, telling them to leave her shop if they couldn’t keep their mouths clean. One or two were in real distress, for they had lost friends or relatives in the raid and were finding it hard to take in.

‘That Mrs Jenkins that used to clean at Drayton Road

School, she’s gone,’ old Mrs Stokes was saying over and over again as Molly made up her order. ‘I saw her only Tuesday afternoon. Bright as a button, she was, laughing and joking, doing a bit of a dance because her chap had come home unexpected. And now she’s gone. It don’t seem possible.’

‘MyJack always called in at the Anchor for a pint on his way home,’ Carrie Barnes, from Carlisle Crescent, chipped in evidently forgetting this had been a habit she had strongly

disapproved. ‘He’ll never be able to go there again now. Flat lis a pancake, and all the beer running away like drainwater.’

‘There’s one or two would say that’s all it was anyway,’ someone else remarked caustically, and the other customers laughed, though there was a nervous edge to their laughter. They went out, leaving Molly and Jess alone.

Molly went on sorting the few boxes of potatoes into a

display, with her five-year-old son Alan and his sister Wendy helping her. She gave Jess a rueful smile. She looked tired and thin, and no wonder, Jess thought, seeing what she’d been through already in this war.

Not too good last night, was it, love?’ she said. ‘Still, I expect you got the children into the shelter, didn’t you?’ ‘We were down there even before the siren had stopped. I know some people didn’t bother, thought it was another false alarm, but I wouldn’t take the risk.’ She laid her hand briefly on Alan’s head. ‘I’ve been through enough worry over these two already.’

‘I know,’ Jess hesitated. ‘You won’t think of sending them away again, then?’

Molly Atkinson shook her head firmly. `I’ll never let ‘em out of my sight again. I know some kids have found good places in the country, but I’d rather have ‘em home with me. If we go, we go together, but I couldn’t go through all that again, not knowing what’s happening to them.’

Jess could understand that, for she knew that Alan and Wendy’s experience of evacuation had not been a happy one, but she still felt anxious for these two little ones, kept at home to face bombing such as Portsmouth had known last night. Still, it was Molly’s decision and she couldn’t blame the young mother. And she’d heard that Alan still hadn’t got over it, he was as clinging as a baby, terrified of the dark and screamed in the night as if he were having the most dreadful nightmares.

She went into the newsagent’s shop and found young Joy, Rose’s friend, serving. Alice Brunner came out from the

back, her face pale and her eyes red-rimmed. It was only ten days since news had come of the sinking of the Arandora Star, on her way to Canada with fifteen hundred internees, and Alice’s German-born husband Heinrich had been amongst them. Reports were still slowly filtering through about survivors, but when Jess asked Alice if there had been any news, the woman shook her head.

‘He shouldn’t never have been on the ship in the first

place,’ she said with weary indignation. ‘Calling him an alien! He’d lived here over twenty years, we went to Deniston Road church together every Sunday. He was a better Christian than a lot of people I could mention around here, saving present company, of course. He wanted to join the LDV, didn’t he? He wanted to help, and instead of that, they take him off in handcuffs and put him in prison like a common criminal, and then send him off to be torpedoed.’ She pushed a straggle of hair back from her forehead. ‘It’s not fair.’

It wasn’t fair, but then war never is, Jess thought as she tried to give Alice some comfort. But what could you say? Heinrich might be amongst the survivors but he might have

gone down with the ship. And until poor Alice knew for%ure, she was going to be tortured by her imaginings, seeing him struggle in the oily water, perhaps badly injured, crying for help, crying for her …

It didn’t bear thinking about. But you had to think about it. You couldn’t just walk away and forget. And there was going to be more of it, more every day until the whole terrible business was over.

‘Well, at least you’ve got Joy,’ Jess said lamely, wondering uneasily if this was the right thing to say. ‘Maybe it’d be better if… ‘Her voice trailed away but Alice picked up the words sharply.

‘Better if what? Better if I let her go off to the country, where she’d be safe?’ Her face twisted and crumpled, as if she were trying not to cry. ‘I suppose you think I’m selfish, keeping her here. But I can’t let her go off too. I’d have nobody then.’

And Alice wasn’t a person who could manage with nobody, Jess thought, gazing at the misery in her friend’s face. She’d

always had someone to depend on — her own mother, when she’d been a child, and then Heinrich. Now it was Joy.

‘Anyway, she wouldn’t go,’ Alice went on, looking at the two girls who were now marking up the Evening News. ‘She didn’t want to go last September, when all the other children went, she just wanted to stay home with us. It was almost like she knew something like this was going to happen.’

Jess collected her newspaper and walked down October

Street, her heart heavy. So many lives being disrupted… As she came nearer to Mrs Seddon’s corner shop, she noticed a young woman with two little girls on the other side of the road, standing outside number 16. At the same moment, Tim came running up to her.

‘There’s someone who’s been bombed out. She’s going to live in that house.’

`Ssh,’ Jess said sharply. ‘People don’t want their business shouted up and down the street for all to hear. How do you know, anyway?’

‘She told Granny Kinch,’ Tim said in an injured tone, and Jess thought that in that case the young woman might just as

well let the town crier know her news. Granny Kinch was a grapevine all on her own. She looked across the road again, and saw that the woman was pregnant.

She hesitated, then went across. The young woman was fitting a key into the lock.

`D’you need any help? I don’t want to seem nosy, but my boy’s just told me you were bombed outlast night. If there’s anything I can do … ‘

The woman turned. Why, she’s not much more than a girl, Jess thought, for all she’s got a couple of kiddies of eight or nine. And expecting another one, too!

She was reminded of herself a few years ago, coming down this same street with two children and another on the way. Only in her case there hadn’t been a war on, and she and Frank had been coming from rooms to their own house.

‘Thanks,’ the girl said. ‘I don’t really know what I’ve got to do. It’s been a bit of a shock.’

‘I should think it has. Where d’you live?’

The girl’s face twisted. ‘We did live down Portchester

Road, but there’s not much left of it now. We got a proper bashing, I can tell you.’

Tortchester Road!’ That was where Frank had been yesterday evening. `D’you mean your house was —’

‘Smashed to bits,’ the girl said bitterly. ‘Had it looking like a little palace too, we did, and then along comes Hitler and smashes it to pieces. Everything we’ve scrimped and saved for. They say they’ll get it rebuilt, or pay compensation or something, but they never will.’ She shrugged. ‘How can they, the amount that’s being bombed? Anyway, if the Germans come and take away the whole lot, they won’t be paying out no compensation. So now we’ve got to start again.’ She turned and looked at the front of the little house, its windows smeared with dust and grime. ‘We’re lucky, really, they’ve put us up the list on account of the children.’ Her hand touched her stomach lightly. ‘And the one coming. There’s some people’ll be in those emergency centres for weeks.’

‘You poor soul.’ Jess gazed at her, wondering what she could say next. ‘So what have you got to do?’

‘Look at this house, say if we want it or not.’ The girl laughed shortly. ‘If we want it! What choice have we got? We’re lucky to get anywhere.’