The Girls They Left Behind (27 page)

‘You don’t have to give me anything for breakfast, Mum,’

Derek said gently. ‘I’ll be staying with Olive, won’t I?’ He kissed her. ‘Remember, we arranged that we’d be stopping with her parents until all this is over?’

Florrie stared at him. ‘Well, yes, of course Olive’s stopping with her mum and dad. But when you’re home ‘

‘You don’t expect me to say goodnight to Livy and come back here to sleep, do you?’ he said with a grin. ‘We’re married now. And we’ve got a double bed at her house.’

His mother looked flustered. ‘Well, you’ll be in for supper, though, won’t you? You’ll let us see something of you. And I know Auntie Jane and Uncle Bill will want to come round once they know you’re home.’

Derek glanced at Olive. There was a querulous note in Florrie’s voice. He thought of his plans for the evening, indoors alone together, if it could be managed, or else at the pictures. Not a family supper, with relatives popping in and out and everyone wanting to know what Army life was like.

And there was Olive’s family too, they’d want him there part of the time.

Olive said firmly, ‘That’s kind of you, Mrs - Mum’ - she stumbled over the word, still embarrassed by having to call Mrs Harker by the intimate title - ‘but I’ll be cooking Derek’s supper myself tonight. My mum and dad are going out for the evening, to see Charlie Kunz and Elsie and Doris Waters at the Hippodrome, so we’ll be able to have the place to ourselves.’ She smiled at Derek. ‘That’s if you’d like that.’

‘Need you ask!’ he said, grinning, and then turned back to his mother. ‘You don’t really mind, do you, Mum? Tell you what - we’ll have a bit of a do tomorrow night. Ask Auntie Jane and Uncle Bill, and anyone else you want. And maybe Olive’s mum and dad can come up too. We’ll have a proper party before I have to go back again.’

‘Mock Duck, it’s called,’ Olive said. ‘Mum says it’s just meatloaf. But the butcher’s got nothing in but sausages today, so it’s all I can do for tonight. And there’s Mock Apricot Flan for afters. It’s carrots really, but they look like apricots and they do taste like them, a bit.’ She gave him a wry smile. ‘It’s all pretend, isn’t it? Mock this and mock that, it’s like playing make-believe when I was a kid.’

‘It’ll be grand,’ Derek said. ‘Anyway, I don’t want you spending all your time cooking.’ He came behind her as she stood at the kitchen table, and slipped his arms around her waist. ‘How long’s it going to take?’

Olive spooned the mixture of sausage-meat, onion, breadcrumbs and herbs into a loaf tin and pressed it down. ‘An hour in the oven. And I’ve already put in two big potatoes.’

She turned into his arms and stood with her eyes closed while he kissed her. ‘Oh, Derek …’

‘So we’ve got an hour to ourselves while we wait for it to cook?’ He moved his hands over her body. ‘Let’s go upstairs.’

‘Derek! It’s only six o’clock.’

‘So what? I’ve got two nights, Livy, that’s all. And God knows when I’ll get home again.’ His hands were urgent now.

‘And your mum and dad’ll be back - what time’s the show finish?’

‘Well, it must finish around eight, there’s another show at twenty-five past. But I heard Dad say they might go for a drink afterwards. That’s if old Hitler lets us off!’ The warnings were continuing to sound, sometimes several times in a day, although Portsmouth had had no major raids since Monday. People were learning to live with the ‘music’ playing so often in their ears. They ran for shelter when the siren’s wail rose, but came out again and got on with whatever they had been doing as soon as the Raiders Passed sounded. And even Annie had been persuaded to go to me theatre when she heard that ‘Gert and Daisy’ were appearing.

‘They’re her favourites,’ Olive said. ‘Uncle Frank wanted to go - he thinks they’re really funny - but the baby’s got a cold and Auntie Jess didn’t want to leave her. I told her I’d look after her, but she was a bit worried it might be a fever.’

‘Well, I’m glad you didn’t,’ Derek declared. ‘The only baby I want you looking after when I’m at home is ours.’ There was a sudden silence and they looked at each other uncertainly.

‘Our baby?’ Olive said. ‘D’you really mean that, Derek?

D’you want us to have a baby?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said slowly. ‘I’ve never thought much about it. I mean, we’ve only been married a couple of months - and we’ve only had two nights together out of that. And what with the war, and not having our own place, and everything…’

‘It’d be daft,’ Olive said, her voice trembling a little. She stood within the circle of his arms, holding him close. ‘It’d be really daft. But, oh Derek, to have our own little baby, to have something of you while you were away. We’d be a family. Our own proper family.’

Derek’s eyes darkened as he looked down into her face. A baby,‘he thought. Our baby. Ours.

Olive, pregnant with our baby.

‘Let’s go upstairs,’ he said with a sudden roughness in his tone. ‘Oh, Livy, I’ve waited so long to make love to you.

Don’t make me wait any longer, please …’

Derek’s leave was short-lived. He was recalled the next day and on 7 September, a year and four days since war had been declared, the full fury of the Luftwaffe was unleashed on London. The East End lay helpless beneath a deluge of high explosive and incendiary bombs, and the sky was lurid with the fires that raged through the docks. In that one raid, nearly five hundred people died and three times as many were injured. It was almost impossible to count the homeless.

Even the Thames was alight as rum, sugar and paint from bonded warehouses drifted on the water and caught fire.

Hundreds of people had to be evacuated, some through streets where buildings threatened to collapse on them at any moment, others by boat down the blazing river. And the blitz was not soon over, as the earlier raids had been. Instead, a thousand aircraft droned overhead, wave after wave of them.

And as night fell and the city burned, they came again, bombarding people who had barely begun to put out the fires of their first attack.

In Portsmouth, people listened to the news each day and shuddered. It was clear that London was the main target now but nevertheless, the fact that Portsmouth lay on one of the Luftwaffe’s flight paths to the capital, and was the home of one of me nation’s most important dockyards, brought the sound of the siren several times a day and disrupted the daily lives of even the most phlegmatic.

The raids were now taking place at night as much as during the day, and families would sometimes find themselves incarcerated in their shelters for the entire night. For hours they sat on benches or lay on bunks, perhaps with only the dim flicker of a paraffin lamp to give them comfort, often in pitch darkness. Occasionally, during a lull, a brave - and desperate - soul would dash up the garden to go to the lavatory or even into the house to make some cocoa. And outside, the planes could be heard roaming overhead, and every few minutes the harsh rattle of anti-aircraft fire would break out as they were spotted in the beam of the searchlights which swept the sky.

‘Night after night,’ Annie said to Jess. ‘I don’t know how we can stand it. I’m so tired, I can hardly stand up, but the shopping’s still got to be done and Ted must have his dinner.’

She looked at the dish she was about to place in the oven.

‘Toad in the hole we’re having today, but it’s more hole than toad. I managed to get a few sausages from Mr Hines, but they’re poor things, disappear to nothing when you put them in the pan. And you can’t make much of a batter when you have to treat eggs as if they came off the Crown Jewels.’

‘How are Ted’s nerves these days?’ Jess too looked exhausted. Frank had to leave home at six each morning for work, and although they tried to sleep in the shelter there was little rest to be had with the roar of planes in their ears. In any case, he was usually on duty as a firewatcher too, which meant standing outside the shelter looking out for incendiaries. Jess hated to think of him out there, exposed to danger, but she knew that someone had to do these jobs, and Frank had said more than once that he felt guilty at not going to fight. He had to do his bit.

‘Poor Ted,’ Annie said, shaking her head. ‘He looks like a man who’s walking in Hell. To be quite honest, I don’t know how he’s going to get through. It’s the blackout, you see, he just hates taking the ferryboat over in the pitch dark. And with bombs likely to drop on the harbour at any time, I don’t blame him. But what can I do? I can’t skipper the boat for him.’

Jess sighed. ‘It’s awful. It’s like the whole world’s gone mad. Look at what’s happening to those poor souls in London. There’s whole streets bombed to bits, and some of those big shops in Oxford Street are completely burnt out.’

‘I don’t know how they can put up with it.’ Annie drew off four cupfuls of water and poured it into the kettle. Ted had worked out that she could save a shillingsworth of gas a week just by doing that. ‘They’re going down into the Underground stations to sleep.’

‘I know. It must be terrible, never knowing what you’re going to come out to in the morning.’

‘Still, we’re giving as good as we get,’ Annie declared. ‘Our boys have been over to Germany, giving them a taste of what it’s like too. That might make them mink twice.’

It might have done, but there was little sign of it. The blitz continued unabated, and other cities were attacked as well.

Merseyside and South Wales were badly hit, and bombs fell on Buckingham Palace itself. It was said that Mr Churchill wanted the King and Queen to leave the country, or at least to move out of London, but they refused and it was reported that the Queen herself had commented that she was glad that the Palace had been bombed because ‘now I can look the East End in the face’.

Portsmouth was not left undisturbed. One evening, after the Raiders Passed signal, a solitary bomber scored a direct hit on a house not many streets away from April Grove, killing a couple who had just returned to bed. Jess and Frank looked at each other, appalled, when they heard the news.

‘But they ought to have been safe,‘Jess kept saying, though she knew that it meant nothing. ‘The all-clear had gone.

They ought to have been all right. It’s not fair.”

Frank didn’t bother to tell her that this was war and you couldn’t expect fairness any more. She knew that as well as he did. But you couldn’t just jettison all your old values in the way that the Germans jettisoned their bombs. You had to cling to something when the world was going mad.

‘Thank God we’re all right, anyway,’ he said, holding her against his broad chest. ‘And thank God the children are safe out at Bridge End.’

But that was another worry. Edna Corner had written to say that she didn’t think she could look after the boys for much longer, as she wasn’t at all well.

‘What are we going to do?’ Jess asked. ‘I’d ask Mrs Greenberry, so they could be with Rose, but I know she’s got another family billeted on her now. Oh, it’s such a pity, the Corners are good to the boys and they love being there.’

‘Well, they can stay there a few more weeks,’ Frank said.

‘Edna says they’re welcome until Reg has to go. And she might be feeling a bit better then herself.’

‘Yes.’ But Jess was unconvinced. Morning sickness might wear off after the first few weeks but there were plenty of other inconveniences to take its place. Perhaps she ought to go out to Bridge End herself and see if she could find somewhere for Tim and Keith to stay. She didn’t want them billeted somewhere where they’d be unhappy - better to have them back home man that, bombs or no bombs.

Tim and Keith received the news that they might have to move with equanimity. They enjoyed living with the Corners, but since life had not yet dealt them any harsh knocks they did not expect them. It had been an adventure coming to Bridge End, and it would be another adventure to go somewhere else. Maybe they’d stay on the farm itself next time and be able to put all their new skills to good use.

‘Edna says she’s having a baby,’ Keith said as they walked across the field to the schoolroom which they shared, turn and turn about, with the local children. ‘D’you think it’s true?

she hasn’t got fat.’

‘I expect she will. It’s not going to be unntil next May, so there’s plenty of time.’

‘May?’ Keith echoed. ‘But that’s next year! Does it take that long to grow a baby?’

Tim shrugged. ‘S’pose it must.’ The two boys had learned about babies soon after their sister Maureen had been born.

The procedure of getting them had seemed far-fetched and unlikely then, but during the past year they had seen cows being serviced by the bull, and rams with the ewes, and Edna had called them early one morning to come downstairs and see Tibby having kittens by the kitchen fire, so they had come to the conclusion mat it was probably true.

‘I wonder how many Edna will have,’ Keith remarked.

‘Tibby had six.’

‘Don’t be daft. People don’t have kittens. And they only have one.’

‘Sometimes they have more,’ Keith argued. ‘There’s twins.

And triplets. And - and -‘ he searched his mind for the word ‘- squads. I bet they could have six if they wanted.’

‘Well, I bet they couldn’t.’ Tim was bored with the subject.

He began to run across the grass, his arms held out sideways.

‘Yaaaaaaarh! You’re a German plane and I’m a Spitfire coming to fight you off. Whee! Whee! Yaaaaaarh! I’ve shot you down, you’ll have to bale out or you’ll get burned alive.’

‘That’s not fair! You didn’t give me a chance.’ Keith zoomed after him, and they zig-zagged across the field, making nasal noises of aircraft engines, gunfire and explosions.

By the time they reached the hedge, they had forgotten all about Edna Corner and her baby, and were totally caught up in their own version of the battle that was going on over their heads each day. They clambered over the stile and tumbled into the lane almost at the feet of the Woddis sisters.

Miss Millicent and Miss Eleanor glanced at them with disgust and walked round them. The hairs growing from the mole on Miss Eleanor’s chin quivered dangerously and the two boys pressed themselves against the hedge almost as if they were hoping to become invisible.