Bia's War (18 page)

Sam took my shawl and looked in
dismay at the bloodstains on my blouse.

“‘What’s happened, Bia?’ he
asked, pushing me down into the armchair next to the range. ‘Have
you had an accident?’”

“I sighed, unwilling to remember
what the pig butcher had tried to do to me, but knowing that I had
to talk about it to get the whole ghastly business out of my
head.”

“‘It was the pig butcher. He saw
me going into the warehouse on my own and he followed me in.’ I
began, but Sammy held his hand up to stop me while he unwrapped me
from my shawl.”

“‘Keep it until Annie comes back
downstairs and I can get Hannah to shut the shop. That way, you’ll
only have to tell it once.’ He said. I knew he was right and, in
any case, I didn’t have the strength left to argue with anyone.
Peter, who had been rummaging in the pantry, popped his head round
the door and asked if he could have one of the pies. I smiled
agreement although my stomach heaved at the thought of food. I
struggled to my feet as Sam and Hannah entered the kitchen.

“‘I’ll have to go and change
this blouse, Sam.’ I said when he looked enquiringly at me. ‘I’ll
burn it on the range because I’ll never manage to get those stains
out of it.’”

“‘Good idea.’ He concurred. ‘You
can tell Annie to come downstairs while you’re there. Can you
manage, lass?’”

“I’d stumbled as I’d stood up
and his voice was full of concern for me.”

“‘I’ll manage, Sam.’ I answered,
although the effort to mount the stairs seemed almost gargantuan
and I wasn’t sure that I would manage.”

“I collected Annie from Simon’s
room and we gathered around the kitchen range while I told the
others everything that had happened that afternoon. It was a
painful and embarrassing story and I really didn’t want to tell
anyone, but they listened with sympathy and encouragement and only
gave their opinions when I had faltered into silence after relating
the tale of the journey home. I had been ripping my stained blouse
into shreds as I had talked, taking my temper and my hurt out on
the material and when I had finished I leant forward and pushed the
torn fabric into the heart of the fire. It burned brightly,
illuminating the faces of the four people as they sat around me. My
heart suddenly expanded with the love I had from them all and I
felt better than I had done all afternoon. In the silence which
fell between us we were all conscious of Peter’s champing jaws as
he finished demolishing the pie I had given him and looked around
him for more to eat.”

“‘I don’t think that’ll be the
last we see of the pig butcher.’ Sam said, looking more serious
than I had ever seen him before. ‘He’ll not take it lightly that
you bested him like that, although I think it unlikely that he will
make any official complaint. He’d be hard put to explain why he was
in a position for you to bite his ear, but he’ll want his pound of
flesh for it, all the same.’”

“‘There was nothing else I could
do, Sam.’ I said. ‘I couldn’t let him rape me and I didn’t know
that Peter had arrived. If I had known, I would have just waited
for him to move Dennison, but I thought it was fight or be raped
and I preferred to fight.’”

Sam’s face turned a deep purple
as I said this and he clenched his fists at his side.

“‘I could throttle the bastard
for what he tried to do to you, Bia,’ he said.”

“‘No, Sam,’ I cried. ‘You
mustn’t do anything to him. He would run to the police immediately
and you could end up in prison for a very long time. I don’t want
you to get into trouble because of me. Think about your children.
They need you and so do we. Please, don’t try to punish him for
what he did to me.’”

“Hannah added her cries to mine
and Annie roundly told him that he was best to keep his distance
from Dennison, that he would get his just deserts in some other
way.”

“‘The man’s evil,’ she declared,
‘and he’ll end in an evil way, you mark my words.’”

“I had to smile at Annie’s
vehemence, she was so convinced that good would triumph and evil
would be punished.”

“‘Keep smiling, lass,’ Sammy
said, ‘you’ve got such a bonny smile and it’s not often that you
get the chance to use it these days.’”

“‘Is it any wonder, Sam?’ I
asked. ‘All I want is a happy and safe home for me and Simon and
all I seem to get recently is trouble.’”

“‘I know, lass,’ he
commiserated, ‘but things will turn out fine, just you wait and see
if I’m right. But we need to get yon bugger warned off before he
tries anything else. I wouldn’t trust him with St Peter’s keys, I
wouldn’t, so we need to get it sorted. Trouble is, I’m not sure
what to do for the best so that none of us suffers. But I think the
first thing is for you to have a good night’s rest, Bia, and we can
face tomorrow when it comes.’”

“I was so exhausted by then that
I readily agreed, leaving Annie and Hannah to put Simon to bed and
to prepare the shop for the next day. I awoke around midnight when
William came home from the Red Lion and made a very noisy pantomime
out of trying not to wake anyone. It was only then that I realised
I hadn’t given a thought to William all the previous day. I hadn’t
missed him when I got home and I knew that there was no way on
God’s earth that I was ever going to tell him what Dennison had
tried to do to me. It was at that point that I realised I depended
on Sam for support, but I only looked on William as a burden I had
to bear through life. I was as likely to turn to him for sympathy
and support as I was likely to fly to the moon. ‘When hell freezes
over’ was my last thought before I slipped into an exhausted
sleep.”

Nana stopped speaking, her
thoughts back in that cold night during the Great War. Victoria
took hold of the delicate hand that lay on the chair arm and rubbed
the back of it with her palm. Nana Lymer’s gaze came back to the
present and she smiled at Victoria’s worried frown.

“Don’t worry, pet,” she said.
“I’m not going to go into a decline over what that mound of blubber
tried to do to me. He got what he deserved and I’d do it again if I
had to. I wouldn’t change what I did to him because what happened
next would have happened anyway, me biting his ear didn’t make him
do it. What he did next was because of what William had done, not
me, and I have never forgiven William for it. I never will forgive
him, not if I live to be a hundred.”

Victoria couldn’t make any sense
out of this garbled explanation, but she could hear the venom in
her grandmother’s voice and wondered exactly what had William done.
But she wasn’t going to find out that day because she heard the
side door open and her mother and father moving into the kitchen.
When she would be able to listen to another part of Nana’s story
was in her mother’s hands and those hands could be incredibly
volatile.

Chapter Nine

The next day was a normal
working day after the excitement of the Christmas season and
Victoria wondered what her mother had planned for her to do. She
was concerned about Nana Lymer because she had looked so frail the
day before when she had related what the butcher had tried to do to
her and Victoria was worried that she wasn’t strong enough to
relive such terrible events without it harming her in some way. It
was with a sense of panic therefore that she heard her mother
explaining to her father that Nana Lymer was very tired that
morning.

“What’s wrong with her?”
Victoria asked her mother, worried that she was the cause of her
grandmother’s fatigue.

“Just old age, I should
imagine,” was her mother’s curt reply. “She’s not getting any
younger and she’s bound to have her off days. I just hope that she
isn’t going to start wandering again, because I don’t need the
hassle of searching for her in the middle of the night, not on top
of everything else I have to do.”

“Do you want me to sit with her
again, so that she’s not on her own when she wakes up?” Victoria
offered, wanting to watch over the old lady.

“I thought you had revision to
do for your mocks? Christmas is over now so it’s time you started
it.”

“I can revise in Nana’s room the
same as if I’m sitting in my room. If she’s asleep she won’t
disturb me, will she?” Victoria suggested.

“That’s true.” Her mother
considered the offer, loath to give in too easily to something that
Victoria wanted to do, but aware that Victoria’s presence in her
grandmother’s bedroom would save her from having to run up and down
stairs to check on the old lady’s health.

“Go on then,” she conceded, “You
might as well do both jobs at once and it’ll give me time to get
the shop sorted out for the New Year rush. But you get your
revision done, my lass, don’t be wasting time talking to the old
girl. I’ve told you before what a romancer she is, you can’t
believe half of what comes out of her mouth.”

Victoria couldn’t understand why
her mother had such a low opinion of Nana Lymer. She wouldn’t dare
speak to Bia like Bia spoke to her mother and Victoria wondered how
old her mother had been when she had begun being so off-hand with
Nana. Why hadn’t Nana stopped her? She thought it was unlikely that
she would ever dare be so rude.

Victoria collected her English
Literature folder and one of her set books from her bedroom and
then tip-toed across the landing and slowly opened Nana’s bedroom
door. The old lady was fast asleep in the large double bed; making
hardly a mound in the bedclothes she was so tiny. Victoria’s face
was creased with concern as she gently moved a lock of hair which
had fallen across Nana’s face. The big brown eyes opened at her
touch and made Victoria jump.

“I thought it was your mother,
that’s why I was pretending to be asleep.” Nana said, dimpling at
Victoria. “Has her ladyship given you permission to sit with me
again?”

“Yes, she’s worried about you
being so tired, so she said I could come in here to do my revision
and watch you at the same time.” Victoria answered. “But she said
you weren’t very well and I was worried that you were upset about
what you were telling me yesterday. You don’t have to tell me
anymore, not if it’s going to make you ill.”

“It’s not making me ill, I just
couldn’t be bothered listening to your mother whinging about her
hard life, so I pretended to be asleep.” Nana confessed with a
grin. “She has no idea how hard it was for my generation during the
Great War, she thinks I’ve had it easy all my life.”

“Haven’t you told Mam what
happened to you?” Victoria was dumbfounded that Bia knew nothing
about her own mother’s early life because she had grown sick of
listening to her mother complain about her early life and
conditions in the Second World War. Most of her mother’s
reminiscences had been about her older brother, who had been the
family favourite (according to Bia) and how he had consistently
tormented her when they were children. She reckoned that she had
regularly been punished for retaliating against this tormenting,
although her brother was never punished for being the
instigator.

“Your mother has never been
interested in anyone else’s point of view.” Nana answered tartly.
“She was a bad tempered little girl and she grew up into a bad
tempered woman. I’ve told you before; your father is a saint for
tolerating her moods and her rudeness. I often wonder how Sam and I
managed to produce such a miserable child, he was always so
sunny-tempered and he had a marvellous sense of humour.”

Victoria had to agree. She had
never heard her mother laugh at anything, although she had never
given the matter much thought before, accepting that, in general,
mothers didn’t laugh. Nana Lymer interrupted her musings.

“Have you got time to listen to
more of my story today, or should you be doing your revision for
your exams?”

“I’ve got plenty of time, Nana.”
Victoria said. “I’ve got the rest of this week and all next week to
revise in and, in any case, it’s only the mocks we are sitting when
we go back, the real exams aren’t until June. But you mustn’t tell
me any more if it’s making you tired and upset.”

“Rubbish.” Nana said,
emphatically. “It’s been the most fun I’ve had in the last ten
years. It’s all too long ago for it to be upsetting me now. Anyway,
there’s another reason for me telling you what happened and you can
help me with that. Will you run an errand for me tomorrow and not
tell your mother what I’ve asked you to do? If she knows what I’m
asking, she’ll do anything in her power to stop it and it’s vital
that I see him.”

“Of course I won’t tell Mam.”
Victoria said. “See who? And why? And what do you want me to
do?”

“I want you to go to Mr Vine’s
office in Station Road and ask him to come and see me. I want you
to make an exact time for the appointment and I want you to let him
in through the side door while your mother is working in the shop.
That way, she won’t know he’s here and the deed will be signed,
sealed and done before she finds out about it. Will you do that for
me?”

“Of course, Nana.” Victoria
replied. “But Mam wouldn’t want to stop you seeing your solicitor.
Everybody has the right to see their own legal representative,
that’s what those two world wars were fought for.”

“You are right, Victoria, but
your mother wouldn’t see it that way, I know. At least, not in my
case she wouldn’t. If it was happening to her we’d never hear the
last of it, but I’m a different kettle of fish all together.
Anyway, on with the story. Are you sure you want me to go on with
it?”

“Sure?” Victoria squeaked. “Of
course I want you to go on with it. I want to find out what
happened to the pig butcher after you bit his ear. Did you bite any
of it off or was it still attached to his head?”

“Oh I didn’t bite any of it off.
I think I would have vomited if I had done that.” Nana Lymer
shuddered at the thought of having part of Dennison in her mouth.
“Over the next couple of days I was very unsettled, never sure if
he might have gone to the police over what Peter and I had done to
him. But Sammy was right in what he said. Dennison would never have
let anyone know that he been bested by a slip of a lass and a lad
who ‘wasn’t all there’ as Peter was so horribly described. After a
few days had passed I calmed down and stopped expecting the police
to turn up at any moment.”