The Girls They Left Behind (42 page)

‘I know what you’re thinking. You think being trained to kill people makes you better than the rest of us. Well, it doesn’t as far as I’m concerned, it just makes you a worse brute than ever.’ But just now I was a mouse, he thought, staring at the fireplace where a few coals lay sullenly glowing.

‘You think you’re God’s gift to the Army. You think you can win the war with one arm tied behind your back. Well, why not? You do everything else as if you’d got one arm tied behind your back!’

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Ethel, shut up,’ he said, goaded at last. ‘The way you go on, I wonder why I bother to come home at all. Aren’t you a bit pleased to see me?’

‘Not much. It’s been nice and peaceful here these past few months. And it’s a change to have a bit of room in bed and not have to listen to you driving pigs to market.’

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I know you’ve had a lot on your plate lately, specially with all the worry over our Shirley. But she’s safe now and down in Devon with her auntie. Why not relax a bit, Ethel? Let’s go out somewhere. The pictures. Or maybe dancing at Kimball’s. You used to enjoy a spot of dancing.’

He moved over to her and put his arm round her waist. ‘You were good at it, too. The belle of the ball, I always said, didn’t I?’

Ethel shrugged, but she didn’t bite his head off. She let him take hold of her hand, as if they were about to waltz. George reached past her and switched on the wireless. It gurgled and spluttered a bit, then warmed up and they heard the liquid notes of Louis Armstrong’s trumpet.

‘Hear that?’ George said, delighted. ‘That used to be one of our favourites. Remember?’ He pulled her closer and rubbed his cheek against hers. ‘A few smoochy dances and then a bit of a cuddle outside before I walked you home. And then a bit more of a cuddle at your front door. You were a lovely little armful then, Ethel. Still are.’ His hand slid down to her bottom. ‘How about slipping upstairs for half an hour before our Joe gets home from work?’

Ethel snatched his hand away and jerked herself out of his arms. ‘George Glaister! Oh, you men are all the same. It’s all you think about. In the middle of the afternoon, too. If that’s what being in the Army does for you, you can go right back to your barracks this minute!’

George stood quite still. He felt as if he’d been doused with icy water. He’d been looking forward to coming home - not because he’d expected any special welcome, but because it was his home and he’d had enough of living in a barracks. He wasn’t a real soldier after all, only a Territorial. He liked a quiet life, looking after his garden and doing a bit of woodwork in the shed. And somehow he’d forgotten what Ethel had become, and remembered her as she used to be, full of life, thrilled with their home, always ready for a bit of kissing and cuddling even if she’d never been all that keen on what went with it. Somehow, he’d expected to find the old Ethel waiting for him.

Ethel had flounced out to the scullery and he heard her run the tap. Perhaps she was making a cup of tea. He’d been home an hour and not had one yet. He sat down heavily in his armchair and picked up the paper. Joe and Carol would be home soon. Perhaps it would be better when they came in.

The day after the big raid when Kathy Simmons’ baby was born, the Evening News carried advertisements for Christmas presents alongside its reports of the damage done. The Landport Drapery Bazaar was going to town on silk stockings, thousands of pairs, at prices from three shillings and sixpence up to six-and-three. That was a lot of money when you could get cardigans and jumpers for the same price, but it would be almost impossible to get stockings at all soon and many women would be pleased to receive them amongst their Christmas presents.

There were also notices about Christmas rations. Lord Woolton, the Minister for Food, had announced a ‘Christmas box’ of an extra four ounces of sugar and two ounces of tea for each person during the week before Christmas. But there was little other festive fare. No cargoes of fresh or tinned fruit were coming into the country, except for a small number of oranges, and although bananas were supposed to be available until Christmas, when their import would be banned, none had been seen around September Street for months. Molly Atkinson shook her head when anyone asked for them, and there were a few mutters about ‘black market’ and suggestions that the Atkinson children didn’t go short of a banana or two. To such comments, Jess Budd was very sharp indeed.

She didn’t believe Molly was keeping anything back, but if she did give her own children first choice of anything special, who could blame her? They hadn’t had much of a Christmas last year, after all.

Turkeys too were in short supply, not that most of the inhabitants of April Grove and its surrounding streets normally bought such grand fare. A big chicken did most of them for Christmas dinner. Annie Chapman usually had one, but Jess and Frank chipped in with the cost of that and it fed both families, together with Jess and Annie’s parents. The advice of the Ministry was not to pay any more than two shillings and ten pence a pound for birds up to eighteen pounds in weight, and two and sixpence a pound for bigger Ones. (What sort of ovens did people have? Jess wondered.) Milk was another problem. In order to keep up the supply to those who needed it most - nursing mothers, babies and young children - the rest of the population had to accept a reduction. There was talk of re-introducing the half-pint bottle, but there were difficulties enough in getting people to return their pint bottles for refilling. Unless they did, a number of areas would have to go back to the churn and bucket method, taking their jugs out to the roundsman to have them filled as he came round the streets.

‘We don’t want that,’ Jess said to Kathy. ‘It’s not nearly so clean. People ought to wash their bottles out and give them back every day.’

‘They must lose a lot through the bombing,’ Kathy said.

‘People put them at their front doors at night, and by morning there’s no front door, let alone any milk bottles.’ She grinned.

‘Someone wrote No Milk Today on one of the doors in Portchester Road. There was practically no house left! I had to laugh.’

Jess smiled. She was feeling better today, for a letter had come from Edna Corner to say that the billet she’d found for Tim and Keith wouldn’t be able to take them after all. The woman’s son was in the Army and he’d been wounded and sent home for her to look after, so the room was needed. And Edna herself was definitely going to her mother and would be there for Christmas, so the boys would have to come home.

Jess was sorry they wouldn’t be able to be with the Corners any more, but she’d known that was going to happen, and she was too pleased at the idea of having them home to worry about what was going to happen next. She’d told Frank she wanted Rose home too, and to her relief he had agreed.

‘We can’t leave her out there by herself when the rest of the family’s all together,’ he said. ‘But the minute Christmas is over, back they go.’

‘Of course. As soon as we find somewhere for them to stay.’

‘The billeting officer will do that,’ he said, but Jess made a face.

‘I’ve seen some of the places they send the kids to. I want to be sure my boys are going to be looked after properly.’

Frank sighed. ‘You can’t even be sure they’d go to the same village again. With half the schools back in Pompey, they’re sending youngsters all over the place. They might finish up in Yorkshire - we can’t go all the way up there to look at billets as if we were the king and queen of England!’

“I wouldn’t let them go that far,’ Jess said obstinately. “I want them near enough to be able to go and visit, like we do now.’

Frank looked at her. He knew she still wept for the children every night, and especially for Rose, who was really unhappy despite Mrs Greenberry’s kindness. Rose had always been close to her mother, following her about the house as a toddler, pretending to sweep and dust, rolling out bits of grey dough and stamping out biscuits with a teacup, standing up beside her at the sink with a tiny washboard Frank had made her. And as she’d got older, she’d turned into a real mother’s help, especially with baby Maureen. He knew Jess missed her a lot.

She missed the boys too, of course. You didn’t have a family around underfoot all the time, especially in a house as small as number 14, without noticing the difference when they weren’t there. And Tim and Keith were so lively, always up to something but not a scrap of real mischief in them. They might scrump a couple of apples from the orchard in Carlisle Crescent, though if Frank caught them at it, he’d give them a walloping, but they wouldn’t go tramping about on other people’s allotments or out-and-out stealing like young Micky Baxter. And of course Jess wanted them at home. He did, too.

He wanted to see them growing up, to watch them change from babies to boys, to young men.

And that was just it. He wanted to see them grow up. And he was desperately afraid that if they came back to Portsmouth they might be killed.

Frank had still not really recovered from that first raid, when he had come round the corner of Farlington Road and seen the mess the bombers had made of Drayton Road School. He couldn’t forget the pall of dust and smoke, the acrid smell that hung over the still trembling streets. He couldn’t forget the sight of the smashed buildings, the debris of brick and wood and concrete that had been hurled everywhere as if by some mad giant. Worst of all, he couldn’t forget the bodies, ripped to pieces by the blast. The foot he had tried to match up with its mate. The head, gazing at him from a pile of blood-soaked bandages.

Sometimes in his dreams, it was Tim’s head, or Keith’s.

He couldn’t bear it when the faces of his sons stared at him like that, in nightmare. And he couldn’t tell Jess about such horrors. They were things he had to bear alone.

Well, there were plenty of people having to suffer worse for this war. It wasn’t what they’d wanted from life, but life had a way of only giving you part of what you wanted. And you just had to be thankful for that part.

He went down the garden path to his shed. He was making Keith a toy fort for Christmas, with bits of hardboard cut with jagged edges to look like a palisade, and little wooden turrets.

Luckily, the boys already had some model cowboys and Indians, and Tim even had a couple of Mounties of which he was very proud. You couldn’t get much of that sort of thing now.

Making things for his children was something Frank had little time for these days. But he’d started in good time and he enjoyed tinkering with something that, for once, had nothing at all to do with the war. With so much of his time and attention taken up with it, from his work in the Yard to his firewatching and warden’s duties, he didn’t get much relaxation at all these days.

He wished there was something he could make for Jess too.

She was a wife in a million, his Jess, and she deserved the best. But he knew there was only one present she really wanted this Christmas.

And that was to have her children home around her once more, and to know that this time it was for good.

Jess too was thinking about Christmas presents.

There were a few bits and pieces she could make for Keith’s fort, flags sewn from scraps of material, wigwams for the Indian camp, and she had managed to buy a second-hand football for Tim. For Rose, she was knitting a jumper out of an old cardigan of her own that she had unravelled. It was just the shade of green that Rose liked best, and it suited her dark hair and brown eyes.

Maureen, at eighteen months old, was still happy with simple toys. She would play for hours with a few cardboard boxes or some newspaper, and Tim’s old building blocks were still her favourites. Her grandmother and various aunts had all made or knitted her things, she had an assortment of woollen animals and dolls in the most unlikely colours, including a fair isle cat knitted by Howard’s wife, Nora, who fancied herself with the needles. But it was difficult to know what else to give her.

She went up the street to do her shopping. Kathy Simmons’ pram was outside number 16, with little Thomas fast asleep inside. His eyes were fringed with long, dark lashes that curled at the ends and seemed to have been tipped with gold-dust. It’s not fair, Jess thought. Boys always get the most gorgeous lashes. And when he opened his eyes, she knew they’d be a dark blue, as if they were going to stay that colour, not the milky colour new babies’ eyes often were before they changed to brown or hazel. He was a lovely baby, and Kathy was quite rightly thrilled with him.

‘I don’t know why I bother to do the shopping every day,’

Jess remarked to Mr Hines. ‘There’s almost nothing about.

But you have to keep coming, on the off chance that someone’s actually had a delivery.’

Mr Hines stood Maureen on the counter. He winked at Jess and laid his finger alongside his nose.

‘Don’t tell anyone, and I’ll let you have a pound of liver.

Came in just this morning. I thought you might be in.’

‘Oh, that’s good of you.’ She watched as Mr Hines weighed it out. There was nothing underhand, or under-the counter about the transaction - liver wasn’t rationed anyway but there were still enough spiteful people around to make comments if they saw you getting something they didn’t. ‘I don’t know why they don’t ration liver. It’s so good for you, and there’s only one in each animal, isn’t there?’

Mr Hines smiled. ‘That’s right. And kidneys too, twice as many of them, of course, but they’re much smaller, they make a real tasty pie or stew. But people don’t seem to make the use of ‘em.’

‘Well, I do, and I make sure this little one eats her share.

It’s good for her blood.‘Jess went to scoop Maureen from the counter. The little girl was kneeling by the papier-mache lamb, her arms around its neck. ‘Say goodbye to Larry now, Maureen. She really loves that lamb,’ she said to the butcher.

‘I wish I could get her something like that for Christmas. But there’s just nothing in the shops for kiddies now.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘The toymakers are all working for the war effort. God knows what they’re making, soldiers never took teddy bears to war with them in my day, but there it is.