Bia's War (16 page)

“That was also the time when I
was grateful that Sammy had found these premises on Queen Street
for me. There were enough rooms upstairs for William to have his
own bedroom, ostensibly to stop him disturbing anyone else in the
night, but really because I couldn’t stand the thought of him
sharing my bed. Whenever he touched me, my skin crawled nearly as
badly as it had done when Dennison had made his advances to me and
I always made an excuse to step away from him.”

“Throughout all this, Sam Lymer
was my rock. He was placid and easy-going, with a quick wit and the
capacity to make me laugh, even when I was at my lowest ebb.
William often walked into a room and caught me laughing with Sam
over some tale he was telling and, although Sam did his best to
draw William into the conversation and share his humour with him,
William was always temperamental when Sam was around. It came to a
head one Sunday when William made a disparaging remark about Sam as
we were all sitting round the kitchen table, eating our Sunday
lunch. Hannah was very upset and rushed out of the kitchen, heading
for her bedroom, closely followed by Annie who was intent on
comforting her. Before she left the kitchen, Annie stopped at the
door and turned on William, something she had never done
before.”

“‘You are a very small-minded
man, William,’ she said, ‘and you have no right to try and belittle
someone who has a generous spirit and a kind heart, particularly in
front of that man’s daughter. It’s time you matured enough to
appreciate those qualities in another human being.’”

“I was amazed at Annie, because
she had previously always treated William with respect, but he had
gone too far even for her. William, as usual whenever he was
criticised, immediately began sulking and wanted Annie and Peter to
leave our home. Quietly, I reminded him that this was my house and
Annie and Peter’s home and would remain so for as long as I had
breath in my body; nobody would be evicted on his whim. What he
said next left me speechless, not a state I usually inhabited.”

“‘You are having an affair with
Sam Lymer! I should have realised this when I first came home. I
must be stupid if it’s taken me this long to realise what you are
doing.’”

“He wanted to carry on, working
himself up into a frenzy but I brought him back to earth with a
bump.”

“‘Don’t be so ridiculous,
William.’ I snapped at him. ‘Sam is and has been a very good friend
to this family. Without his help, I wouldn’t have managed half as
well as I have done, but we have never done anything reprehensible
in the whole of the time I have known him, mainly because I am a
married woman and he lost his wife last year. He still grieves
deeply for her, but he throws his energies into working hard,
caring for their children. He also has two boys who are fighting in
those trenches that you have nightmares about, but he hides his
worries and presents a happy face to the world, something of which
you have no conception. Annie is right, you are incredibly
small-minded, but I would also add that you are a poisonous little
worm. Now, get out of my sight before I say even more.’”

“He stormed out of the room and
then out of the house, leaving me shaking with anger at his
behaviour. I apologised to both Hannah and Annie on his behalf,
knowing full well that he would never think of apologising himself
and then set about the tasks of clearing up in the kitchen and
getting the baking started for the next day. My mind wandered as I
worked, kneading the dough for the bread, but I stopped short when
the thought rose into my mind that I did admire Sam a great deal.
He was a real man, tough and intelligent, but also sensitive and
caring and William didn’t compare very well at all.”

Nana Lymer faltered to a stop,
reliving in her mind the worries and joys of that time of her life.
Her recollections of her feelings of that day were crystal clear,
more so than the more recent past and she was re-living the
happiness she had felt when she had realised that what she felt for
Sammy Lymer was more than mere friendship.

“Are you ok, Nana?” Victoria
asked, worried about the far-away expression on her grandmother’s
face.

“Ok?” Nana replied. “I’m more
than ok, I’ve got more happy memories than any woman deserves, but
where had I got to? Oh yes, the problems I had with William when he
returned from the war. Those problems were soon surmounted by even
bigger ones. I found out what the lesson was that Butcher Dennison
wanted me to learn. But I think that will have to wait until
tomorrow. It’s tea-time now and I’m tired. I think I need a snooze
and your mother will be wanting you to help with making the tea.
We’ll carry on again tomorrow, if your mam allows it.”

Victoria had to accept that that
was all she was going to get that day, but she was worried that her
mother wouldn’t let her sit with Nana the next day, not when she
had spent the whole afternoon with her. The shop would be closed
again the next day because it was Boxing Day, so nobody would be
doing any work apart from preparing meals. If she helped her mother
cooking lunch she might manage to snatch the afternoon with her
grandmother.

Chapter Eight

For a reason Victoria couldn’t
fathom, her mother was in an incredibly good mood the next morning,
singing as she prepared breakfast and not requiring any help at
all. The reason behind it became apparent after breakfast was over
and Victoria had started the washing up.“Have you got anything
planned for today, Victoria?” her mother asked, as she passed the
plates over for her to wash. “Have you got homework to do for
school or anything?”

“Nothing that I’ve got to do
today.” Victoria replied, wary at her mother’s pleasant tone of
voice. “I’ve got revision I’ve got to do for my mocks, but I don’t
intend doing any of that today. It is Boxing Day, after all.”

“Yes, I think you should have a
rest from schoolwork today. Your dad and I have been invited to
have lunch at the Welsh’s new house in Great Ayton and I wondered
if you would look after Nana Lymer for me so that we can go. You
wouldn’t be interested in looking at their new house, but I would
like to go and I can’t if there’s no-one to look after Nana.”

“Of course I’ll look after
Nana.” Victoria replied, absolutely ecstatic that she wasn’t
expected to spend any time with a family she really didn’t like.
She couldn’t bear that her mother, unusually for her, saw the Welsh
family as the perfect family with a wonderful home and was
extremely jealous of them. A visit to their house usually produced
a shopping spree when her mother would acquire items which she had
seen at their house, convinced that they were the epitome of good
taste and worth acquiring. Victoria had found their old home
incredibly ostentatious and disliked the articles her mother would
buy in her desire to copy them. She had no desire to visit their
new home and would much rather spend the afternoon with Nana, free
from any interruptions.

So, by two o’clock, her parents
had set off on their trip and Victoria was free to make tea and
biscuits and take them up to Nana’s bedroom.

“Victoria!” Nana exclaimed when
Victoria entered her bedroom carrying a tray. “I didn’t think we
would get two days of freedom!”

“Mam and Dad have gone to see
the Welsh’s new house and she wanted me to stay at home and look
after you. So I’m here, ready for the next part of the story and
I’ve brought tea so it doesn’t make you thirsty, talking to
me.”

“You’re a good girl, you really
are. I just hope my story lives up to your expectations. Now, where
had we got to?”

“William had come home wounded
and was taking it all out on you. You were working your socks off,
trying to keep the shop going and look after Simon, as well as
spending many hours during the nights helping William through his
pain and his nightmares.”

Victoria was pleased that she
could explain it all so well.

“Yes, pet. Life was difficult at
that time. It was January 1917 and the snow lay thick on the
ground. The winds seemed to be coming directly from the arctic,
they were such lazy winds.”

“Lazy winds?” Victoria
interrupted. “What’s a lazy wind?”

“A lazy wind is one that can’t
be bothered to blow round you, so it blows straight through you;
it’s as cold as that.” Nana explained. Victoria smiled. She had
experienced a ‘lazy wind’ the week before when she had been
shopping in the town. That wind had blown through all her layers of
clothing, obviously too lazy to blow round her.

“As I said,” Nana continued,
“The winds were very cold and very strong, it snowed regularly and
there were bitter frosts at night. I often thought about those
mothers’ sons who were huddled in trenches in France and Flanders,
waiting to be blown to smithereens and shivering with the cold and
the fear. I also thought about their mothers and wives, sitting in
their homes and worrying about their husbands and sons and praying
for them to come home in one piece, or even slightly less than one
piece, like William.”

“William continued with his pain
and his nightmares and his bad temper and his maudlin self-pity,
all regularly spaced throughout the day, every day and I tried to
hold it all together, often feeling so stretched out with the
strain and the tension that, if anyone had plucked my strings, I
would have twanged like a heavenly harp.”

“Simon breezed sunnily through
all our lives, always happy and smiling, always so loving, my ray
of sunshine when everything else seemed so dark. Annie watched and
listened and took note of all that went on between William and I,
but she rarely spoke of it and, if she did, it was to let me know
that she was always there if I needed a shoulder to cry on. Good
friend that she was, she knew that if she had shown me pity and
sympathy I would have dissolved in front of her and not been able
to continue. She and Peter and, of course, Hannah and Sammy, kept
me sane at that time and I thanked God every night for sending the
four of them to me.”

“Hannah sang her way through
every day, hymns, marching songs and even some questionable tunes
and lyrics that she picked up as she went around town. I knew her
father had this same capacity for enjoying life and he also hummed
and sang his way through every day, although I knew he was
extremely worried about his two boys who were fighting over at the
Front. He hadn’t heard from either of them for a long time and,
occasionally, he would let slip that he was worried about them,
although he always quoted ‘no news is good news’ whenever anyone
asked him if they had been in contact with him.”

“The shop was doing well,
despite the fact that there were shortages of some foodstuffs. I
had held the farmers to their contracts, so I usually had the
basics available in my shop and the boys who worked at the docks
were very good about letting me know if a ship berthed carrying any
goods which they thought would capture my interest. Some things
were very difficult to get hold of because the enemy were sinking a
fair amount of merchant shipping, but we managed to always have
something to sell.”

“Sam and I continued to buy
houses whenever we had the resources available to pay cash for them
and we made a tidy sum in rents, so I knew we would always have
something to fall back on should the enemy succeed in sinking the
bulk of our shipping and we couldn’t continue to stock the shop.
What sort of a state the country would have been in if that had
happened was something none of us wanted to think about, but we had
to plan for all eventualities.”

“I was still gathering a few
pieces of jewellery when families hit hard times and needed to
exchange their valuables for food. I was always fair over the value
I placed on these items, although I did always factor a profit into
what I gave in exchange. The size of the profit sometimes depended
on whether I thought the owner of the jewellery would ever come
back to redeem their goods and I must admit I was swayed by the
person who wanted to pledge their goods against some food. I wasn’t
a real pawnbroker in that I never gave money in exchange for items,
I always used food as my currency and that kept most of the
drunkards away. They didn’t want to pawn items for food, they
wanted to pawn items for cash, so they mostly avoided me, although
some did come to me in desperation and ask if I would give them
money.”

“The items which were never
redeemed stayed in the belt round my waist that Annie had made for
me and, when that got too full, I kept them in a strong box at Mr
Vine’s. He never knew what I was keeping in there, but he was a
true professional and never enquired. When I found I was holding
something I didn’t like I would go to one of the main jewellers in
the town and swap it for gems, following Mr Sanderson’s advice and
the jeweller began letting me know when he got an item in stock
that he thought I might like.”

“This was a part of my business
of which William was unaware, although Sammy knew that I was
squirreling jewellery away. William knew that Sam and I owned and
rented out houses, but he didn’t ask for any details about them
partly, I think, because Sammy was involved in it and partly
because he was frightened that I would refuse to reveal any
information about them. He was right in his thinking because I had
no intentions of ever letting William know just how much I was
worth in case he attempted to appropriate any of it. He had taken
to drinking to relieve the pains in his legs, but he only had what
money I paid him when he worked in the shop. When this ran out he
had to stop and I think it was only lack of funds that stopped him
from drinking himself to oblivion every night.”

“This was the year that Simon
started school and William made it his task to take him and collect
him every day, so that he was always out of the shop at these
times. I noticed that people brought their items for pawning when
William wasn’t around and I wondered why they did this. Was it
because they knew that William wasn’t party to what business deals
I did or was it because he was often unpleasant with customers,
particularly if they refused to let him serve them and asked for
me? I didn’t know, but it served my purpose to not have him hanging
around when I was valuing items and he was never given access to
the book in which I kept my records of the items pawned and the
amount of food handed over.”