The Girls They Left Behind (54 page)

And have snowball fights,’ he added as an afterthought.

‘That’s if you’ll allow me.’

The two boys gazed at him. They tried to imagine his spidery figure racing about the garden, hurling snowballs.

They glanced at each other.

‘You’re not allowed to put stones in snowballs,’ Keith said at last.

‘Perish the thought! My snowballs will be as pure as - as as the driven snow.’ He beamed at them. ‘Do you drink tea?’

‘Tea?’

Mrs Mudge said firmly, ‘They drink milk while they’re in this house. Growing boys need it.’

‘I daresay you don’t use all your sugar ration, then,’ the vicar said hopefully.

Tim and Keith looked uncertainly at the housekeeper.

Their mother had given her their ration books and they took no further interest in them. Food appeared on the table and they ate it (unless it was cabbage). They put sugar on their porridge and in their cocoa, but that was all.

‘I wondered, you see,’ Mr Beckett said delicately, ‘whether we might come to some arrangement.’

‘Arrangement?’

‘Over sugar. It’s a failing of mine, you see. A very sweet tooth. I do like plenty of sugar in my tea, and Mrs Mudge says my ration won’t stretch to it. So if you don’t use all of yours…’

‘You’ll not take the children’s sugar,’ Mrs Mudge said at once. ‘The idea!’

‘Oh, but I’d be happy to buy it,’ the vicar said at once. ‘A halfpenny a spoonful, I thought.’ He looked appealingly at the boys. ‘You might like to discuss it and let me know later what you decide.’

‘They’ll do nothing of the sort -‘ Mrs Mudge began, but Keith was already nodding.

‘I’ll sell you mine. I don’t mind not having any.’

‘It’s unpatriotic,’ Mrs Mudge said. ‘Why, it’s almost Black Market.’

‘You can have mine too,’ Tim said. ‘We can buy a present for Mum. And our baby.’

‘I never heard of such a thing ‘

‘You can have our tea as well if you like.’

‘Such an example to set ‘

‘That’s settled, then,’ the vicar said, beaming. ‘And now we’ll go and make a start on the snowman, shall we?’

‘That you will not!’ Mrs Mudge said, putting her foot down at last. ‘Not until you’ve all cleaned your teeth and put on warm clothes. You,’ she said, fixing Mr Beckett with a stem eye, ‘are still in your pyjamas.’

Tim and Keith scrambled down from their chairs and made for the door. The vicar followed them. He turned and gave his housekeeper a wink.

Mrs Mudge watched him go with a feeling partly of exasperation, partly of tenderness. She knew quite well what he was doing. She also knew that he was thoroughly enjoying it.

‘Boys!’ she said, and started on the washing-up.

The weather was still bitterly cold. Snow had fallen after the terrible raid of the early weeks, and now it melted into icy floods. The second blitz of Portsmouth was its thirty-seventh raid, but the sirens had sounded many more times than that and people were by now accustomed to whatever arrangements they had made for sheltering.

Frank and Jess had made their Anderson as comfortable as possible. With a concrete floor and plywood fitted against the corrugated iron walls, it was dry and draught-proof. Frank had covered the plywood with cream distemper and Jess had pinned pictures from old Christmas and birthday cards all over it. They brightened up the shelter and gave the baby something to look at and, because Maureen was fond of a comic strip which featured a baby called Henry, she included some of these and added more magazine and newspaper cuttings, pictures of Mr Chad, peering over a wall and asking ‘Wot - no bananas?’ or ‘Wot - no coal?’ and photographs of the King and Queen on their visit to Portsmouth.

Winston Churchill came to Portsmouth too, and toured the bombed areas. He picked his way over streets still littered with collapsed houses and pitted with deep craters, and grunted, looking like an angry baby with a cigar stuck in his mouth.

The Royal visit had been a fillip for the city, and especially for Olive Harker, for Derek had actually been presented to them when they came down Commercial Road. 698 Unit were there with a mechanical caterpillar and hawser, pulling down a dangerous wall. Actually, it didn’t really need to be pulled down at all, Derek said, and the soldiers weren’t best pleased at having to do it just for ‘show’. But they’d put their backs into it all the same and the Royal party, with the Lord Mayor and his wife and a crowd of VIPs, had watched until the dust had settled and then come over to speak to the commanding officer.

‘O’Rorke was like a dog with two tails,’ Derek told Olive when he came in that evening for the hour or two that was all that was allowed for time off. ‘He puffed out his chest like a cockerel and told ‘em all about how he formed the Unit single-handed and took us over to France. Pity he couldn’t claim to have beaten the Germans on their own ground, but he had to admit we’d got evacuated from Dunkirk.’

‘Well, that’s something to be proud of, it seems,’ Olive said.

She was still pale after the loss of her baby, and had lost much of her old zest. But the memory of Kathy Simmons, whose baby had been born only to be killed a few weeks later, and who had herself died at the same moment, served to remind her that she was still one of the lucky ones. ‘Better to have been evacuated than killed on the beach, or taken prisoner.’

She rested her head on his chest. ‘I’m so thankful you’re still here … And did the Queen actually talk to you?’

‘She did.’ Derek looked as proud as Colonel O’Rorke.

‘She asked me my name and whether I was a Pompey chap.’

‘Derek! She never said “Pompey”!’

‘She did. Well, I thought she did, anyway. Honest, Livy, she was just like anyone else, only she spoke a bit posher. And she asked about you ‘

‘About me?’ Olive sat up and stared at him. ‘How on earth did she know about me?’

‘Well, she didn’t, I suppose. She just asked if I was married and what your name was, so she knows about you now, anyway. And -‘ he looked away, as if half uncertain as to what to say. ‘She asked if we had any children.’

‘Did you tell her?’ Olive asked quietly, and he nodded.

‘I said we’d been expecting, you’d been expecting, but when the blitz came … well, I just told her what happened, that’s all.’ He glanced at her face and added as if in justification, ‘There didn’t seem to be anything else to say, Livy. She was really interested.’

‘It’s all right.’ She took his hand and stroked it. ‘It just seems funny, telling the Queen of England about us. Did she say anything else?’

‘She said to tell you she was very sorry. And not to be disheartened. She said, “There will be a time when we’re no longer at war, and you’ll raise your family in peace.” That’s what she said, Livy.’

‘She said that to you?’ Olive gazed at him, marvelling. ‘The Queen said that to you? And told you to tell me she was sorry about our baby? Oh, Derek.’

‘I know.’ He grinned. ‘It makes it seem different, somehow, doesn’t it.’

‘It makes it seem easier to carry on.’ Olive rested her head on his chest again. ‘There’s been times these past weeks, Derek, when I’ve felt, well, that it just wasn’t worth the effort.

All the struggle to get up every morning and get through the day. Never knowing what’s going to happen next. Waiting for the next raid, waiting for the bombs. Sometimes I almost wished Hitler would come himself, and bomb us out of it all, because there don’t seem any other way. I can’t see that it’s ever going to stop, not until there’s just nothing left anywhere.’

‘Livy’

‘And then you come and say the Queen’s been talking to you, and told you to tell me she’s sorry. About our baby! And says that there will be peace, and we will be able to have our family and bring them up without having bombs dropping on us. Well, somehow it seems possible again. After all, she ought to know. It’s not as if they haven’t been bombed themselves. They know what it’s like.’

Privately, Derek wondered if they did. Buckingham Palace was rather different from the houses in April Grove and March Street, and the King and Queen did not spend their nights in an Anderson, or in a damp, overcrowded street shelter. But he did not say so. It had been a real pleasure - a ‘tonic’, as more than one man had called it - to see the King and Queen at such close quarters, and to talk to them just as if they were ordinary people. And if it made Olive feel so much better, then it was worth any amount of red tape and show.

Yvonne had come back from that first blitz on Portsmouth subdued and anxious, her careless gaiety dimmed. Her own home had not been bombed but many others had, and she had seen the waves of destruction and heard the screams of the injured. The memory haunted her dreams and she worked with a forlorn doggedness where before she had danced laughing through the days.

‘I know we’re doing good work out here,’ she said to Betty, ‘but it don’t seem enough, somehow. When I saw what other people are having to put up with, what they’re having to do, I ought to be doing more.’

‘I know what you mean,’ Betty said. ‘It doesn’t seem right to be safe and comfortable when all the people we know are having such an awful time.’ She looked around the fields.

Spring was coming rapidly and the trees were beginning to unfurl their buds. One corner of the orchard had been white with snowdrops all through February, and now primroses were beginning to star the banks, and violets throw down a velvet cloak. She had never seen so many birds, nor heard so much liquid song, and would have spent hours watching their busy nest-building. Soon the sheep would begin to lamb.

There was plenty of work on the farm, and it was hard. The girls were fitter now and could keep up with all that Jonas and Mr Spencer asked of them, but there was still a lot to learn and they fell into bed dog-tired at night.

‘You don’t have to be in danger to be helping the war,’ Mr Spencer said. ‘People have got to have food. We’re feeding Servicemen as well as civilians. If it wasn’t for us, the country would starve and Hitler would walk in and take the lot.’

‘Anyway, they won’t let us change now,’ Erica observed.

‘The Land Army’s a service just like the WAAFs and the rest.

We’re in it and we’ve got to stay in it, unless we can give a good reason for getting out.’ She thought for a moment and then added, ‘Not that I want to get out, as it happens.’

The attic room had become home to the three girls. They pinned up snaps of their families and pictures cut from magazines. Erica had brought a bright quilt from home for her bed, and had given Betty and Yvonne cushions. When Dennis left the farm, Mrs Spencer offered her his bedroom, but she shook her head. ‘I’d rather stay here.’

‘She’s nicer than I thought,’ Yvonne said, and Betty heard her creep across the attic floor in the night to comfort Erica as she lay weeping for Geoffrey.

The three girls had drawn closer together, and Betty knew that the deaths of the three airmen had forged a bond between them. She knew that their work was valuable. But it was still hard to stand at the window and watch the glow of fires blazing in Portsmouth. It was hard to wait for the telephone call or telegram that would tell her everyone was safe.

I ought to be there, sharing it, she thought. It doesn’t seem right to be safe, these days.

Graham was polishing his shoes and brushing his hair before going ashore for a jaunt round Portsmouth’s pubs with Arnie and Knocker White. They’d done this quite a few times now and found plenty of girls who weren’t actually tarts yet were more than willing to accommodate a lonely sailor for the price of a few drinks. And why not? ‘It’s my bit of war work,’ one fluffy little blonde had giggled as she squirmed suggestively on Graham’s knee. ‘And I can tell you’re a nice boy, just a bit lonely so far away from home.’

Graham had hidden a grin at that. Gosport wasn’t exactly a million miles away! But he’d let her believe he came from London, and she’d listened wide-eyed to his tales of the blitz there, and made no objection afterwards when he took her into a dark shop doorway. Why did I want to waste so much time with Betty? he thought, swaggering back to the ship afterwards. Why bother about little prudes like that, when there’s fun and games to be had for the cost of a port and lemon, and no worries afterwards?

All the same, he couldn’t help wondering how Betty was, out on the farm. And he missed her bright chatter and the way she would look at him so adoringly with those big hazel eyes of hers. And he missed sitting in her mum’s front room with her, holding hands and listening to ITMA or Band Waggon. It hadn’t really mattered all that much that she would never give in to him, it was all part of the game. And now he’d never know what it was like with her.

With Betty, it would really have been making love. With these other girls, the fluffy blonde, the toffee-nosed brunette, the dozens of others who haunted the pubs ready to go walking off arm-in-arm with any man who would buy them a drink, it was no more than sex.

Well, there was nothing to be done about that. Sex was pretty good after all, and who wanted a steady girlfriend worrying about whether she’d got ‘caught’? Time enough for that when the war was over. For now, best to enjoy yourself, make the most of what was on offer and get yourself a few pin-ups to look at while you were at sea.

The siren went just as he had finished slicking Brylcreem on his hair.

Everyone in the mess groaned. Most of them had been looking forward to a few jars, and now their evening was gone, unless the raid proved to be a short one. They had to be ready, on standby, to go wherever help was needed in the city. They might have to man stirrup pumps or hoses, render First Aid, dig through piles of newly-fallen masonry to find people buried by exploding bombs. They might have to save their own ship, for the bombers would surely aim for the Dockyard, or go to the help of one of the others tied up at jetties or moored in the harbour. Any of these and more they might be called upon to do. And until they were called, all they could do was wait.

‘Bugger it!’ Graham said in disgust. ‘Bugger, bugger, bugger it!’

For Derek, Bob Shaw and George Glaister, the raid signalled action.