Bia's War (2 page)

“Well, we needn’t worry about
that. Keith will be going back to university after Christmas and
she’ll have a whole term to forget him in. I’ll take this drink up
for Mam and then I’m going straight back to bed. Don’t be long down
here, Jack.”

“I won’t.” Jack answered. “I’m
just going to check that the shop is okay and I’m going to put the
latch down on the Yale lock on the side door. If your mother tries
to get out that way again tonight she’ll not be able to open it.
Good night, pet.”

Bia made her way upstairs and
put Nana Lymer’s cup of tea on the bedside table. It was wasted
effort, because the old lady was now sound asleep and it seemed
unlikely that she would wake again that night. Bia sighed heavily,
wondering just how much longer she would be able to care for her
mother. She couldn’t do a day’s work in the shop and then spend the
night traipsing the streets looking for her, she was no spring
chicken herself. At least she had Victoria, who would carry meals
up to her Nana and she did seem to enjoy sitting with her Nana and
talking to her, when the old lady was lucid. There was no point in
worrying about it; that didn’t help anybody, she just had to get on
with it and hope that a miracle happened and Nana became easier to
care for, although there was only one way that it would get easier
and Bia didn’t want to contemplate that.

The next morning, Victoria was
already up and dressed when Bia went downstairs to the kitchen and
had even filled the kettle and was making herself toast.

“It’s a good job that you are up
early, young lady. I need you to sit with your nana so that she
doesn’t wander again today.” Bia said. “Your Dad and I are going to
Aunt Jessie’s funeral and we can’t leave her when she’s this
muddled in her wits. You will have to sit with her to make sure she
doesn’t try and get out again. We had a hell of a night last night
with her. She got out about two o’clock in the morning and we
searched for her for ages, but we had to go to the police station
in the end. Luckily, a young constable had found her and he brought
her to the station while we were there, so no harm done, but she
was only wearing her nightie and she could end up with double
pneumonia. You can watch her for me today?”

“Course I will, Mam. I enjoy
talking to Nana, she makes me laugh.”

“Well, she might not make you
laugh today. She didn’t know who she was last night and the
policeman who found her could only get one word out of her and that
was ‘Simon’.

“Who’s Simon?” Victoria asked.
“I’ve never heard of a Simon before.”

“Neither have I.” Her mother
answered, “But that was the only bit of sense that the constable
could get out of her last night. He seemed to think she was looking
for this Simon, whoever he is. I think it’s just another example of
your Nana living in another world. One thing’s for sure; she
certainly wasn’t on this planet last night.”

“I’ll take her breakfast up and
see what sort of a day she’s having today.”

“Yes, you do that. That will
mean that we can at least go to the funeral. Don’t take any
nonsense from her while we’re out.” Bia watched her daughter carry
the breakfast tray out of the kitchen and along the hall to the
stairs. She was praying that her mother would be aware of her
surroundings this morning, so that Vicky would be able to care for
her while they were out at this funeral, but she wasn’t confident
that it would be so.

Vicky entered the bedroom and
found her Nana Lymer sitting up in bed, wearing a pretty pink bed
jacket, with her hair nicely brushed and a big smile in place on
her face.

“It’s my favourite granddaughter
and bringing me breakfast in bed, I see. What have I done to
deserve this special treatment?” Nana said, as Vicky opened the
door.

“Mam and Dad are going to Aunt
Jessie’s funeral today and Mam’s asked me to sit with you, so that
she knows you’re safe while she’s out.” Vicky answered.

“Does that mean I’ve done
something to make her think I’m not safe, then? You’d better tell
me, it’ll come better from you than your mother, if she’s in one of
her ‘martyr moods’.”

“You went out again last night,
in your nightie and with nothing on your feet.” Vicky said. “Don’t
you remember anything about it? That’s why Mam’s worried about you
today and why I’m sitting with you, to make sure you don’t do it
again. Evidently, a policeman found you and took you to the police
station and Mam and Dad brought you home from there. Can’t you
remember any of it?”

Nana Lymer’s face was creased
with worry.

“I’m getting worse, aren’t I?”
she said. “This is happening more and more often and I can’t
remember any of it. What can I do to stop it? If I carry on like
this then your mother won’t be able to look after me and I’ll have
to go into a home and I don’t want to do that. How can I stop
it?”

Vicky took hold of Nana’s hand,
distraught that she was causing her so much distress and wishing
that she could do something to alleviate it. An idea formed in her
mind and, although she was reluctant to force her Nana into doing
something which could distress her further, it seemed as though a
way out of this was possible. She gently stroked the frail hand she
was holding, took a deep breath to steady herself and said,

“The policeman who found you
last night said you kept on saying the name ‘Simon’. He was under
the impression that this Simon was important to you, but he
couldn’t get you to tell him who Simon was. Do you know someone
called Simon? Do you think you could have been looking for
him?”

The hand she was holding had
jerked as Victoria spoke the name ‘Simon’ and Nana Lymer had
dropped her gaze to the counterpane which her other hand was
kneading as though it was a lump of dough.

“You do know the name.” Victoria
said, gently. “Who is he and why would you be searching for him in
the middle of the night? If you talk about it, it may help
you.”

Nana Lymer was silent for so
long that Victoria was worried that she had retreated back into the
half-world that she sometimes inhabited, the times when she wasn’t
living in the real world. She was regretting mentioning Simon now,
because Nana Lymer was frowning and there were tears forming in her
eyes.

“He was important to you, this
Simon, wasn’t he?” Victoria said, lowering her head so that she
could look into Nana’s eyes. “I don’t want to upset you, but don’t
you agree that it might help if you talked about him? I won’t tell
anyone else, if you don’t want me to, I promise.”

Nana was silent for a couple of
minutes, but then she raised her head and looked Victoria straight
in the eye.

“It’s not a nice story, what
happened to Simon, and it goes back a long time. I thought I’d got
over it years and years ago, but obviously I haven’t, otherwise I
wouldn’t be wandering the streets looking for him now, when, in my
right mind, I know I’ll never see him again. But I don’t know if
you are strong enough or old enough to hear a story the like of
this.”

“I’m fifteen, Nana; I’ll be
sixteen next month. I’m not a child and if it helps you it would be
worth it wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, I suppose you’re right,
but I don’t want you to tell anyone else what I’m going to tell
you.” Nana said. “And, I’m only telling you so that I can lay this
ghost to rest and make it easier for your mother to care for me.
Promise me you won’t tell a soul what I tell you? Please, Victoria,
this is very important to me.”

“I promise, Nana. I’ll never
tell another living soul. Cross my heart and hope to die.” Victoria
was very concerned over just how agitated her Nana was getting.
Whatever the story was, it was troubling her deeply and it probably
would do her a great deal of good to get it out in the open.

“Don’t use that phrase lightly,
Victoria. We none of us know when we’re likely to die and there’s
no point putting a jinx on yourself.” Nana was very stern, which
was highly unusual for her.

“I promise I won’t breathe a
word of what you tell me, Nana.” Victoria agreed. “Is that good
enough?”

“Your word is good enough for
me.” Nana hesitated, composing her mind and deciding where exactly
she should start with the terrible tale with which she was about to
burden her granddaughter. “Your Granddad Sam was my second
husband,” she began, realising that she had to start right back at
the beginning of the whole episode. “My first husband was a man
called William Drinkwater whom I married in 1910, a long, long time
ago. He was three years younger than me, but I thought he was the
best of the bunch I had to choose from and I was twenty five years
old. I didn’t want to wait for marriage for any longer, because I
was desperate to have a child and I was worried that, if I didn’t
get married soon, I might get too old to have one. Looking back on
it now, I can see how silly that was but, at the time, I thought my
time was running out. It was a stupid thing to do, to marry someone
just because he was the best of the bunch, but that’s what I
did.”

“So you didn’t love him, Nana?
Not at all?”

“No, child.” Nana smiled at her
granddaughter. “No, I didn’t love him, but I know that he loved me,
in his own way, and I thought that would be enough. He had a decent
job in the iron works and he wasn’t a drinker, so I knew he
wouldn’t squander his wages in a public house or become a
wife-beater like some of them did. So I agreed to marry him and we
had a very quiet and very cheap wedding in May 1910. After the
wedding, we moved in with his parents and his two sisters, because
we couldn’t afford to rent a house of our own, but by the summer of
1912, four months before our baby was due, we moved into a house on
Albion Street and I thought we were set for life. I had a husband,
a house and a baby on the way, what more could I wish for?”

“Were you happy? Isn’t that
important?” Victoria wanted to know.

“I thought I was at the time.”
Her grandmother continued. “I had everything that I had wished for
from being a young girl. What more could I possibly want? Then,
just before my baby was born, I realised that I had achieved what I
had been aiming for and that it wasn’t enough. William was a
pleasant, hard-working young man, but he was beginning to bore me.
I organised everything in our lives and he went along with
everything I said or did. I was in charge of the family finances
because William gave me his pay-packet, unopened, the day he
received it. There weren’t many who did that in those days. I had
chosen the house we were living in because I was the one who had
discovered it was up for rent, I was the one who had viewed it and
put a deposit on it; I was the one who had chosen the furniture,
whether second-hand or new and I was the one who was carrying the
child I had craved for. William didn’t seem to be doing anything;
we didn’t even have conversations anymore. But there was nothing I
could do about it. I had made my bed and I had to lie in it. What
else could I do?”

“Couldn’t you have left him, or
got divorced?” Victoria asked. “Then you could have lived on your
own and you might have met a man who didn’t bore you.”

Nana Lymer smiled sadly at her
granddaughter’s innocence.

“I had no reason to divorce
him.” She said. “He wasn’t a philanderer or a drunk. I and my
unborn child weren’t in any danger from him and, anyway, divorce
wasn’t an option in those days. I just had to get on with it and
hope that he could acquire a character and a personality change
somewhere along the line. And, of course, he was the breadwinner.
In those days men went out to work and most women stayed at home
and cooked and washed and cleaned for their family. If a girl had a
job, like being a teacher for example, she would have to give it up
when she got married.”

“I didn’t realise that life was
like that then.” Victoria was amazed at the distance society had
travelled in just over fifty years. She had ambitions to become a
teacher and thought she probably wouldn’t have got married if it
had meant that she would have had to have stopped teaching.

“It was the War that changed
everything, not the war that finished nearly thirty years ago, but
the Great War, the War to end all wars as they called it when it
began. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I was talking about 1912,
when I was a young wife with a baby on the way and everything to
live for. None of us knew then that the whole world was going to
change for ever.”

“Nana, was the baby Simon? Was
that who you were looking for last night? And if it was, what
happened to him? Have I got an Uncle Simon somewhere?” Victoria
asked.

“You’re moving the story on too
quickly, pet, but yes, my baby was a boy and I named him Simon.”
Nana said. “He was born on October 8th 1912. Of course, once he was
born, I was too busy to worry about being bored because babies take
such a lot of caring for and he was the most adorable baby I had
ever laid eyes on. His hair was blond with a wave in it and his
eyes were huge and the blue of the sky on a summer day. I loved him
so much it hurt. He was the be-all and end-all of my life and I’m
afraid I ignored his father because I was so tied up in the
adoration of my child. I think I even forgot about William being
his father, although I continued to keep the house clean and put
food on the table, organise our finances and make decisions about
trivial matters and always, always I cared for my child.”

“Did William notice what you
were doing? Was he jealous of the baby?” Victoria asked.

“Oh yes, he noticed, more than I
could have given him credit for, if the truth be known. William
didn’t say anything to me, that wasn’t his way, but he became even
quieter when we were together, until I stopped telling him what
Simon and I had done every day. I didn’t consult him on anything, I
just went my own sweet way and he became more and more withdrawn
from me. He was always good with Simon, though, and played with him
and talked to him when I was busy cooking or when I went out
shopping. I should have seen what was happening, but I didn’t
because I was so wrapped-up in being a mother, I forgot about being
a wife.”