Perseverance Street (2 page)

Half a minute went by without the door opening. The boy was about to knock again. If no one answered after two knocks he’d leave it for someone else to deliver later in the day.

‘She
is
in, love,’ called out one of the watchers helpfully.

He knocked again and waited. The door opened, very slowly. The boy held out the envelope and announced, ‘Telegram for Mrs Lilian Robinson.’

‘W – what is it?’ Lily asked him, making no attempt to take it.

The fourteen-year-old-boy had met with many reactions, none of which he was ever prepared for.

‘Are you Mrs Lilian Robinson … Mrs?’

His arm was still outstretched, holding the envelope to which her eyes were glued with dread.

‘Er … yes, yes, I am.’

Her quivering hand went to her mouth. The neighbours were glancing at each other, not quite knowing what to do. Should they go across and give her their support? Eventually, with an effort, Lily took the envelope and disappeared inside the house.

The boy got on his bike and pedalled off to deliver a
Missing In Action
to a house on Perseverance Mount. He really hated this part of the job but his mam had told him the war would be over soon and he wouldn’t have too many more to deliver. The neighbours gathered round in a circle and discussed what to do for the best. Jobs were being assigned.

‘Give her five minutes
then a couple of us go over – make her a cup o’ tea. That’s allus good fer shock.’

‘That’s her washin’ on t’ line. I’ll take it in – it looks like rain. Someone’ll need ter keep an eye on ’er Michael.’

‘I’ll do that. I’ll bring him over here fer ’is tea, poor little beggar.’

They were being good neighbours in a time of crisis. But good neighbours can be capricious creatures, as Lily would soon find out.

Friday 27th April 1945

The Austin 7 rattled over the
cobbles with its wipers fighting a losing battle against the pouring rain. The street was deserted because the rain had washed all the residents indoors. The small car slowed down to walking pace and the large man inside peered out through the windscreen to try and identify Lily’s house from the numbers neatly painted on the bricks beside each door. The rain was washing chalk graffiti off the walls. One of them was a streaked and fading
HITLER IS A TWERP
, alongside a blurred drawing of the ubiquitous Chad saying
WOT, NO BANANAS
? Washing lines were strung out across the street, all empty except for two sparrows sitting side by side and taking it in turn to disappear inside a flurry of feathers and spray, then reappear, as calm as you like. Beside the large man sat his wife who had wiped a hole in the condensation on her side window with her gloved hand. Her eyes were scanning the doors.

‘The odd numbers are on my side,’ she was saying. ‘Nineteen … seventeen … fifteen … Here we are.’

She looked at the dark red door of number 13 which stood out from its drab, paint-peeling neighbours. Even through the rain she could tell that the front steps had been donkey-stoned, leaving a neat, rust-brown line around the edges. It was the doorway of someone who usually tried to make the best of things. The man stopped the car outside the house and turned off the engine, which shuddered to an eventual halt. He pulled on the handbrake and turned off the windscreen wipers. He glanced through the side window to where his wife was pointing, then from the back seat picked up a grey trilby which he jammed on his balding head and checked his appearance in the driver’s mirror. His wife took out a powder compact and gave her cheeks a liberal dusting. The man set his hat straight, tweaked his military moustache into place, stepped out of his car and stretched the cramp from his legs. Then he walked round to the passenger side to open the door for his wife who was quite diminutive and fitted the tiny car a lot better than he did.

‘Pity you didn’t think
to bring an umbrella,’ she said brusquely.

High in the sky several barrage balloons swayed in the wind, anchored to the ground by steel cables; two of them disappeared into the rain clouds, up there to prevent German aircraft flying too low. Surplus to requirements really; as much use as party balloons, some people said, but the Home Guard needed something to do and guarding the barrage balloons was the only job available at this end of the war. The man glanced up at them, then winked at his wife.

‘Just what the doctor ordered,’ he said.

The street doorway
offered little protection from the rain and they stood on the top step as close to the door as they could. Their knock was answered almost immediately and the man removed his hat, partly out of politeness and partly so that she might immediately identify him and invite them in out of the rain.

‘Mr and Mrs Oldroyd … I didn’t … Oh, please come in out of this awful weather.’

The couple stepped through the door, gratefully, and wiped their feet in turn on the door mat. At Lily’s behest Mr Oldroyd took a seat in the chair that he guessed had once been her husband’s and his wife sat down on a two-seater settee. A small boy was playing on the floor with a brightly painted wooden giraffe.

‘Hello, Michael. I wonder if you remember us?’ said Oldroyd.

‘Of course you remember Mr and Mrs Oldroyd, don’t you, Michael?’ said Lily. ‘You’ll remember feeding the horses in the field at the back of their lovely house in the country.’

Michael looked up at the man and nodded, slowly, to indicate that he did remember – if not Mr and Mrs Oldroyd, then at least the horses. Lily turned off the radio which had been tuned in to the Light Programme and playing
Music While You Work
. She was wearing a pinafore that hung down from her bump like a curtain in a bay window. She pushed away a loose strand of dark hair which she’d hurriedly tied back when she’d heard the knock at the door. She’d looked outside and seen the car, and recognised it as the Oldroyds’.

She wore no make-up and looked older then her twenty-five years. Her red-rimmed eyes were underlined by the dark shadows of sleepless nights. Her skin was pale and drawn and her mouth slightly turned down at the edges. Not for Lily the bloom of a pregnant mother; such a bloom tends to pale when your soldier husband is killed in action, but beneath it all lay the evidence of a good-looking young woman. That was the one thing Oldroyd remembered about her.

She looked to have
been busy around the house. It was probably all she had to keep the pain of bereavement at bay.

Three days had passed since Lily had heard the news; ten days since Larry’s death. He would have most probably been buried by now, with whatever military honours were available, so she’d been told. That didn’t help. To lose her Larry and not have the chance to say a proper goodbye was hard.

He’d just been an ordinary man, a twenty-eight-year-old bank clerk who given the chance would probably have risen to bank manager after the war. Unremarkable but decent, Larry was never a fighting man but he’d been called up along with two million others and he’d had to go. Given the choice he’d have stayed at home with Lily and Michael and the new baby and let someone else do the fighting.

‘Keep your head down, Larry,’ she’d told him often enough.

‘No need to tell me that, love. Them Nazzies won’t get me in their sights. No two ways about that, love.’

The day after she received the telegram, a man from the War Office had called on her, offering his condolences and giving her details of the help she could receive, including her war widow’s pension. He told her that Larry had been killed in action, apparently by a German shell as he was helping a wounded comrade to safety under heavy fire. It sounded quite heroic. She’d tried to conjure up pictures of her Larry springing into action against the enemy, but her imagination wouldn’t stretch that far. The violent manner of his death had seemed so much at odds with the gentle manner of his pre-war life.

Oldroyd sat scrunching
the brim of his trilby in both hands, his face in mourning. ‘We read about Larry in the
Yorkshire Post
this morning. Edith insisted that we come as soon as I could. We’re ever so sorry. We both are. Edith cried buckets when she heard, didn’t you, love?’

‘Heartbroken,’ confirmed Edith.

She glanced at Lily’s bump. ‘This should be such a happy time for you. What a cruel world we live in. Such awful people, them damned Germans. Why they should want to do this beats me. Bernard’d join up in a flash but he’s too old to go fighting wars.’

‘Well, I’m pushin’ fifty now,’ Bernard told her. ‘Mind you, I did me bit in the first lot. Lucky to come home unscathed.’

He smiled down at Michael then placed a contrite hand over his mouth and looked at his wife, wondering if they’d spoken out of turn about Larry’s death.

‘It’s all right, I’ve told him,’ said Lily, running a crook’d finger under her left eye to remove a tear – something she’d done so often in the last three days that she scarcely knew she was doing it. ‘He knows his daddy has gone to heaven where all the really brave soldiers go.’

There was a silence. Edith
looked around the room which smelled of pine furniture polish and looked spotless, with pristine white lace curtains and a generous square of patterned Axminster over gleaming linoleum.

‘You keep a good house, Lily. A house to be proud of.’

‘I have to keep myself busy or I’ll go mad.’ Lily paused and added, ‘You always know it can happen, but nothing prepares you for it. It’s usually something that happens to other folk.’

‘I know,’ Bernard said. ‘I lost a brother in 1917.’

‘I didn’t know that. I’m ever so sorry.’

‘Don’t really know how he died. Missing presumed dead was all we were ever told.’ He looked out of the window. ‘Yer’ll have heard of Passchendaele, I suppose?’

‘I have,’ said Lily.

‘Foul weather – ten times worse than this. July and absolutely bucketing down. Heaviest rain in thirty years. Went on for weeks. Absolute quagmire. Mud so deep a man could drown in it, and a lot did. Horses as well. If our Stuart was killed outright it’ll have been a mercy. The odds were that he was probably wounded and drowned in the mud.’

Then he added, sadly, ‘I was in Flanders meself as matter of fact – different regiment. Didn’t find out about our Stuart for nearly two months and I can’t have been above five miles away from him when he died. The whole thing was a right bloody mess. A waste of good men’s lives. At the end of it all there was nowt left worth winning.’

‘My Larry was killed
outright by a German shell.’

‘He won’t have suffered, then.’

‘No, I don’t imagine he did.’

‘I have to say, this is a war worth winning – not like the first bloody lot. What I’m trying to say is that your husband won’t have died for nowt like our Stuart – if that’s of any comfort.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t like to think he’d died for nothing, Mr Oldroyd.’

‘It’s Bernard and Edith. No need for us to be formal. We are old friends, after all.’

Lily wouldn’t have classed them as old friends, but it would have been impolite to point that out. They were sitting in a wine-coloured three-piece lounge suite in uncut moquette. Also in the room was a drop-leaf dining table with four chairs, an oak side board on which was a wedding photograph, a Bush radio and three vases of flowers representing, Mrs Oldroyd guessed, the condolences of well-wishers. The wedding photo showed Lily looking her best in a white wedding gown and Larry beaming. He was looking at her from the corner of his eyes, as if unable to believe his luck at having won himself such a beautiful bride.

One wall was dominated by a cast-iron range that was a fireplace, an oven and a water heater. Above it was a mantelpiece on which stood a grinning toby jug, an old tobacco tin containing money for the milkman and other sundry requirements, a slender glass vase full of multi-coloured wooden spills (to light the fire, a cigarette or the gas ring in the scullery) and a framed photo of Larry in his army uniform. He wore a beret set at a rakish angle and a moustache that he’d grown since he’d been called up. The beret was a bit too big and the moustache didn’t really suit him. It wasn’t Lily’s favourite photo of him but it was the most recent and it had been done in a studio so she’d given it pride of place.

It was a modest
dwelling of which the most had been made. Larry had been buying the house on a bank mortgage which, since his call-up, was being paid by the army in exchange for Larry fighting for his country. It would now be paid off in full by the bank, something Lily hadn’t even thought about until a letter of condolence had arrived from the bank that morning. She was a property-owning war widow. It was little consolation.

‘Would er … would you like a cup of tea?’

Her voice was hesitant and devoid of all the life and charm he remembered in this young woman, but it was no more than he expected. An antique wallclock that looked to have come from a much grander house than this began to chime the hour, which was five p.m.

‘Tea would be lovely, thanks,’ said Bernard.

‘Edith?’

‘Please. Milk, one sugar.’

‘Just milk for me, please.’

Lily gave him a wan smile. ‘That’s right. I remember. You say you’re sweet enough, or something like that, don’t you.’

He returned her smile and said, ‘Something like that.’

She went into the scullery with Michael clinging on to her skirt, not really remembering these people who had come to see his mam. After a couple of minutes she came back with two cups of tea, rattling in their saucers; so much were her hands shaking.

‘Are you not having
one?’ Bernard asked, taking the tea from her.

‘What? Oh, no. I’ve just had one. This is what was left in the pot. It should be all right.’

He took out a packet of Churchmans from his pocket and offered one to Lily, who declined.

‘No thanks very much. I’ve given up until the baby’s born. I’ve been told it’s harmful to the baby to smoke during pregnancy.’

‘Really? Well, I’ve never heard that. They blame cigs for most things nowadays, even cancer. Rubbish to that is what I say. Cigarette smoke purges the lungs – I’ve read that. That’s why footballers smoke.’