The Girls They Left Behind (33 page)

‘You’re not the only one in this sort of trouble,’ she said gently. ‘There’s Ethel Glaister, half out of her mind over her Shirley. It must be just as bad for her, thinking of her little girl ending like that.’ Her voice broke a little. ‘Alice, I know it’s horrible. I can hardly bear to think of it myself. But it’s no good torturing yourself. Whatever happened to Heinrich, it’s over now. If-if he died, it must have been quick. You’ve got to think of yourself now. And Joy. She shouldn’t be working all those hours in the shop, she ought to be having a bit of fun with her friends. She’s getting old before her time.’

‘She’s always been a helpful girl. She’s always liked being with me and helping.’

‘But she’s not with you, is she? She’s down there all by herself. And you’re up here moping. Look, why don’t you let me make you a cup of tea while you get up? Have a wash and put on something fresh. Put the wireless on and listen to Music While You Work.’

‘A cup of tea,’ Alice said in a droning voice. ‘A wash and a clean blouse. That’s all it needs, is it, to make me feel better?

To make up for not having Heinrich?’ She turned away again.

Jess stared down at her friend and felt like shaking her by the shoulders. It might help. But it might also turn Alice against her, and that would only make things worse. She gave a little sigh of frustration and removed Maureen’s hand from a silver brush that lay on Alice’s dressing-table.

‘I’ll go and make a cup of tea,’ she said quietly. ‘It’ll be downstairs if you want it.’

Ethel Glaister looked through her back window and saw Frank Budd out in his garden, looking at the runner beans.

She went outside, walking slowly down the garden path. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Frank hesitate then come over to the fence.

‘Hullo, Ethel.’ His voice was gruff and awkward. ‘How’re you feeling now?’

She gave him a wan smile. ‘Oh, all right, you know. Bearing up. Not much else to do, is there? Someone’s got to keep the home together, what with George being away.’ She moved closer, looking up at him. Tm glad to see you. It’s proper lonely with no one to talk to -you know.’

Frank looked embarrassed. ‘I thought Jess had been popping in to see you.‘Jess had told him that she’d spoken to Ethel several times, meaning to offer her sympathy or ask if there was anything she could do. But after her first desperate cry for help, Ethel hadn’t seemed to want sympathy. She had withdrawn even further into herself, answering tersely as if Jess had no right to be speaking to her, making Jess feel guilty that she still had all her children safe.

‘Oh, she has. But there’s times, you know, when a woman wants a man to talk to.’ Her voice trembled a little. ‘I suppose my trouble is, I’m not really a woman’s woman. I need a mar to lean on. And with George away …’

Frank shifted his big body uncomfortably. ‘I don’t know what I can do to help, Ethel. I mean, if there’s anything you can’t manage round the house or garden, you know you’ve only got to ask, but Jess is better than me at, well, at anything else. I know she feels really sorry about Shirley.’

Ethel drew back slightly. Frank irritated and excited her both at once. He didn’t seem to have any idea how to talk to a woman, how to offer a bit of comfort. Surely it wouldn’t do him any harm to unbend a bit, just once in a while! And it would help her no end. She was starving to have a man take care of her, take a bit of interest in her. It didn’t have to go any further than that. She just wanted to know that they were interested, that’s all. Just to make her feel a bit better about things.

‘Jess has just gone up the road to see her sister,’ Frank said, moving towards his shed again. ‘Shall I ask her to pop in when she comes back?’

Ethel shook her head. ‘No. Don’t bother.’ She watched him wistfully for a moment, then went back indoors.

She looked in the mirror again, trying not to see the lines between her brows, the discontented splay of wrinkles around her lips. Her eyes moved to the snap of Shirley on Southsea beach, that George had pinned up on the wall so that he could look at it while he shaved.

The sudden wave of misery struck her, just as the waves at sea must have struck her little girl. She turned away abruptly, went into the back room and switched on the wireless. Glenn Miller’s music swelled through the room and she turned it up as loud as it would go, remembering how George had switched it on last time he’d been home and wanted her to dance.

Bugger George, being away just when she needed him.

Bugger Frank Budd, who could have taken her mind off all her misery if he’d had a mind to. Bugger the swines who’d torpedoed the ship her Shirley was on, and left her to drown in the middle of the cold Atlantic.

Ethel stood in the middle of the room, letting the music swirl about her. Then she twisted the knob of the wireless to silence it, and stalked out of the room and up the stairs. She put on her powder-blue jacket and the little hat with the veil, found her best high-heeled shoes, and marched downstairs and out through the front door.

People didn’t wait for the siren to sound now. They went to the shelters as a matter of course, taking rugs and cushions, books and knitting. Many people ‘trekked’ out of the city each evening, going to the countryside north of Portsdown Hill for safety. There they would stay with relatives or sleep in tents or barns.

‘They ought to dig tunnels in the hill,’ Tommy Vickers remarked. ‘That’d be the best thing. Hide us in caves, like they’re doing round Dover. Like they’re doing in London, really.’

But tunnelling into the hill, even though it had already been extensively quarried for chalk, would be a major undertaking, and surely the war wasn’t going to last that long?

‘No,’ Bert Shaw said lugubriously, ‘but we might need ‘em to hide from Hitler when he invades.’

‘You don’t have to talk like that,’ Peggy said sharply. ‘We want to keep cheerful, not make ourselves more miserable.

Hitler’s not going to invade, our boys won’t let him.’

‘So why are there all those notices up about what to do when German soldiers come marching down the streets?’

Bert demanded. ‘Shut the door in their faces? That’s what one of them says, just as if a Jerry with a machine-gun’s going to be put off by the likes of you and Jess Budd with a broomstick in your hands. And what about all those instructions about ignoring “false alarms and rumours” and “only obeying the orders given by the British Government”? How can you do that if the country’s occupied, like France? There won’t be any British Government, will there!’

Peggy turned on the wireless.

‘I’m not listening to any more of that sort of talk, Bert Shaw. Defeatist talk, that’s what that is. I’d sooner listen to Tommy Handley and Mrs Mopp. Or those Americans in Hi Gang. It’s a laugh we want, not gloom and doom.’

It was almost the end of September when Ethel Glaister accosted Frank out in the garden again. Her face was pink

and glowing, and she was waving a newspaper and half laughing, half crying.

Frank stared at her. ‘What is it? What’s happened?’

‘It’s the ship! The kiddies — they’re safe. A lifeboat - they found a lifeboat.’ The words cascaded from her lips. ‘The City of Benares, that’s the ship my Shirley was on. They’ve found a lifeboat full of kiddies, they’ve got them safe and my Shirley’s one of them.’ She’s safe, she’s safe?

‘Your Shirley? Are you sure?’ Frank snatched the paper and read it quickly.

‘Well, that is good news.’ He smiled at Ethel. Why, she looked really nice with no make-up on and her face happy and laughing. Why couldn’t she be like that all the time? It was her bitterness that put him off, pulling her lips into tight folds and cutting lines between her brows, and putting a hard edge to her voice. Like this, she was altogether different. ‘I’m really pleased. I know Jess will be too. She was proper upset about your Shirley.’

‘Eight days they were in the lifeboat,’ Ethel said, taking the newspaper back and reading it again. ‘There was a woman with them, she kept on massaging them to keep them from getting cold and stiff, and she told them a story. They’d nearly run out of food when one of the boys saw a flying-boat and waved to attract its attention. When a ship finally came to rescue them, the poor little devils were too weak to climb aboard.’ She looked up at Frank. ‘They will be all right, won’t they? My Shirley ‘

‘She’ll be all right,’ Frank said gently. He reached across the fence and patted her awkwardly on the shoulder. ‘You’ll get her back safe and sound now, you’ll see.’

Ethel nodded. She went back indoors and wept over the newspaper, thinking of her Shirley tossing about at sea in a lifeboat wondering if she would ever see her home again.

Well, at least Jess Budd wouldn’t be able to look at her now as if she’d done something wrong. Shirley had had a narrow escape, but she was still alive and just because the Germans had torpedoed the ship it didn’t make Ethel a bad mother like some of the women round here would like to make out-Alice Brunner, for instance, and Peggy Shaw who was so thick with Jess. She could stand up and look them in the eye again, any day!

Jess had been down to North End to see her parents. Frank told her the news when she came in and she hurried out into the garden first thing next morning to see Ethel.

‘I’m so glad. I bet you can’t wait to have her back again. You won’t want her out of your sight now.’

Ethel Glaister looked at her over the garden fence.

‘Oh no, I shan’t have her back here,’ she said. ‘I’ll send her straight down to Devonshire. I won’t take any more chances with her.’

‘Well, I can understand that,’ Jess said. ‘But surely you’ll want to be with her? I know how I’d feel if it was one of mine.’

‘And how can I go to Devon?’ Ethel demanded. ‘I’ve got Joe and Carol to think of too, haven’t I? And George likely to be back home again at all hours. You know they’re sending the unit back to Pompey, don’t you, to clear up some of the bomb damage. You’d think they’d at least let them spend a bit of time at home, there’s enough jobs piling up, for God’s sake, but no, he says they’ll be too busy, he’ll just have to get home whenever he can. Drop in for a meal when he feels like it, that’s what he means. Sometimes I think I’m running one of those British Restaurants.’

‘You should think yourself lucky he’ll be able to come home at all,‘Jess retorted. She’d bitten her lip with Alice but she didn’t have the patience to listen to Ethel’s grumbles.

‘Specially now you’ve heard about Shirley. Think of poor Alice Brunner, still worrying about Heinrich. You’ve got a lot to be thankful for, Ethel Glaister.’

‘Oh yes,’ her neighbour sneered. ‘Bombs dropping all round night after night, and the street going downhill. That Nancy Baxter’s getting worse - she’s bringing sailors home quite openly now, the brazen slut. And I wouldn’t be surprised if that Mrs Simmons is another of the same sort.

Husband in the Merchant Navy! We’ve only got her word for it.’

‘Ethel, how can you say such things? Kathy’s husband came home last month, I was there when he arrived.’

‘And how d’you know that was her husband? Show you their wedding certificate, did they? You mark my words, once she’s had that baby she’ll be back on the game same as Nancy, see if I’m not right.’

Jess stared at her in disgust. ‘I’m not listening to any more of this. You’re a spiteful woman, Ethel, and one day that tongue of yours is going to get you into real trouble. I came out to tell you I was glad about your Shirley, and so I am, but I don’t have to stand here and listen to filth. Kathy Simmons is a decent little body and she’s having a bad time. And if I hear you saying things like that about her again, you’ll be sorry.’

She turned and went back into the house, her blood seething. But she had too much to do to worry about Ethel Glaister. It was washing day, and the copper was just coming to the boil. There were Frank’s working shirts to scrub and Maureen’s few nappies to wash, though there weren’t so many now that she was getting so good on the pot. And then there would be all the mangling to do before she could even hang the things up to dry.

Washing took almost the whole day, and if it wasn’t good drying weather there would be wet clothes hung round the fire indoors all evening and even draped over pictures on the wall.-Sometimes it was Wednesday before she could do her ironing, and that meant the whole week was put out of joint.

She sighed and bent to take the big yellow bar of Sunlight soap from the cupboard Frank had built under the kitchen sink. Arguing with Ethel had put her in a bad mood. It would be a long time before she went out to give her a pleasant word again!

For Alice Brunner, there was no good news.

Each morning she woke knowing that she must go through another day without Heinrich. And without knowing even whether he was alive or dead, for she had still heard nothing of him. Many of the men on board the Arandora Star had died, many others been saved, and yet there had been no word of Heinrich. No word of whether he was one of those taken on to Canada, no word of whether he had been deported instead to the Isle of Man. It was as if he had vanished into thin air.

He must have drowned.

There were times when Alice wished he had died before the war had even begun. At least then she could have been a widow, and respected as such by her neighbours. At least she wouldn’t have had to suffer the spite of people like Ethel Glaister, who had sneered at her for being married to a Jerry and refused to buy her newspapers from a Hun. And she would have known what had happened to him. She could have shared his last moments.

But no sooner had she let these thoughts travel through her mind than they would be followed by a searing guilt. How could she wish her beloved Heinrich dead? He had been her rock. Her lover, her husband, her friend. Never strong, she had clung to him through all her periods of despondency, through the depression that had so inexplicably followed Joy’s birth and which had struck her, usually without apparent reason, at intervals since.

And there was Heinrich’s own family too. As soon as war was declared, all communication from Berlin had stopped. It was terrible that a man could be split apart from both his families, the German one and the British. His mother and sister in one country, his wife and daughter in the other.