The Girls They Left Behind (61 page)

Jess looked at her neighbour with sympathy. ‘How’re you feeling now, Peg?’

‘Oh, all right. I mean, I’m all right in meself, I just can’t get it out of my mind, that’s all. That mine, landing right on the hospital, it seems criminal. I was talking to the doctor only a minute before, ever so nice he was, and you could see he was dead beat but he was still looking after people. That man we took there, and the two women all blown to kingdom come.’

She shuddered. ‘And Graham Philpotts. That’s what I can’t get over. Young Ginger. Him and our Bob knocked about together quite a bit when they were little. I remember him tying a string to my door-knocker one day and hiding round the corner.’

‘He was a terror,’ Jess agreed. ‘But there was no harm to him, you know. Our Betty thought a lot of him for a while, till they split up.’

Peggy nodded. The whole street had known that Betty Chapman had been going out with Graham Philpotts. And just because they’d parted brass rags didn’t mean she couldn’t be sorry he was dead. ‘How’s she taken it? Our Gladys is proper upset.’

‘Well, she’s cut up about it, who wouldn’t be? But she don’t say much these days. She’s changed since she went out to the farm.’

‘They’re all changing,’ Peggy said. ‘My Gladys and Diane, your Annie’s two girls. They’re all changing, Jess. Maybe for the better, maybe not. But there ain’t a blind thing anyone can do about it. All we can do is hang on - and try to give each other a bit of strength.’

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Strength.

It was the one thing that Alice Brunner needed most desperately, and the one thing it seemed impossible for her to have.

It was over a year now since Heinrich had been taken away, and would soon be a year since the Arandora Star had been sunk. Slowly, she was beginning to face the fact that he must be dead.

And so unnecessarily. Since the sinking of the Arandora Star, there had been a change of heart over the treatment of ‘aliens’. So many had, like Heinrich, lived in Britain for many years, had made their homes here and adopted it as their own country. Their families were British. Many of them had suffered in Germany and wanted nothing more than to see Hitler beaten and sanity returned to their homeland. And yet, they had been treated as undesirables, and deported as if they had been criminals.

Ordinary people, like Jess Budd and her husband, had respected Heinrich Brunner and men like him. And for once, ordinary people’s voices were heard. They reached Parliament itself and caused a bitter debate in which the whole system was denounced as a ‘bespattered page in our history’.

The interned ‘aliens’ began to be freed.

They were coming home. Alice had read about it in the newspaper. Over fifteen thousand of the twenty-seven thousand who had been snatched away, were being allowed home. And Heinrich could have been one of them.

He should never have been taken away, she thought bitterly.

She got out of bed, on that first morning of June, and looked out of the window. There had been a raid during the night, but it had been short-lived and she had not bothered to go to the shelter. What was the point, when Heinrich was dead?

In the garden, there was an old apple tree. Heinrich had loved that tree. He would watch it blossom in April, and talk of how it reminded him of an apple tree in the garden where he had spent his boyhood. His mother would sit under it, sewing clothes for her family or shelling peas. He would look for the first pale green leaf to unfurl, and the first tiny apple to form. He would touch the deep creases of its bark, almost as if he were fondling it.

Alice stared at it and realised that it must have blossomed this spring without her noticing. It was in full leaf, the creamy white flowers gone, and she knew that if she looked more closely she would see the small green apples hanging on its boughs.

All this had happened, and she had never noticed.

. Alice felt a sharp pang of guilt. It was as if she had betrayed her husband, who had loved the apple tree. She had neglected it, one of the things he loved; because he was not here, she had brushed it aside as if it were of no value, and let its beauty go by unrecognised.

And how much else have I neglected? she thought.

The back door opened and she saw Joy come out into the garden. She carried an old shopping basket, filled with washing - her own and Alice’s underclothes and stockings.

She must have been up for an hour or more, marking up the newspapers which the paper-boys must by now be delivering, and doing these bits of washing. Alice watched as she hung them out on the line Heinrich had fixed up between the apple tree and the kitchen wall, and felt another stab of guilt.

I’ve neglected her too, she thought. Our daughter, Heinrich’s daughter, I’ve let her do the work I should have been doing. I’ve let her shoulder all the responsibility of the shop. And now I’m even letting her wash my knickers. A girl not yet fourteen years old, losing the last days of her childhood because of my selfishness.

She turned away, overwhelmed by the extent of her neglect, neglect her friends, like Jess Budd, had tried to warn her about, and which she had not understood but now saw clearly, as if a veil had been stripped from her eyes. I’ve been living in a fog, she thought.

She looked into the mirror and was shocked by what she saw. A woman looking older than her years, her face grey and lined, her hair coarse and unkempt. The blue eyes, which Heinrich used to say were the colour of robins’ eggs, had faded and there were anxious lines around them. Her mouth looked pinched and her cheeks hollow, as if she had false teeth and had forgotten to wear them. Her neck was gaunt and lined.

If Heinrich came back now, he would not recognise her.

‘What have you done to yourself, Alice Brunner?’ she asked aloud. ‘What have you let happen?’

A surge of feeling flooded through her and she was so unused to it that for a moment she scarcely recognised it for what it was. For almost a year she had struggled with grief and hope, the two blurring into despair. She had turned away from pleasure, thinking it disloyal to Heinrich, and in the same way had brushed aside any emotion other than bitter misery. Now, for a few seconds, she could not identify the emotion that swept through her body like a clean, sharp wind.

Anger. It was anger. Anger with the system that had taken Heinrich from her, anger with the enemy who had sunk his ship and brought about his death - for she was certain now that he must be dead. His own countrymen! But most of all, her anger was directed at herself.

‘You’re a mess, Alice Brunner. A selfish, self-pitying mess.

And it’s time you pulled yourself together and started to do what Heinrich wanted you to do, what he trusted you to do. Be a proper mother to his daughter.’ She thrust her hands through the greying hair, lifting it away from her neck, piling it loosely on top of her head in the style she knew he liked.

‘And if you have to be his widow, be a widow he’d be proud of.’

For Gladys, the night of the third blitz brought more than a broken arm and the loss of someone she’d begun to grow fond of. As soon as she was out of hospital, she began collecting leaflets on the women’s Services.

‘I don’t know whether to join the Wrens or the WAAFs,’

she said to Olive Harker, who had come down the street to see how she was. ‘Or even the ATS.’ She smiled, but it was a twisted smile and without merriment. ‘One thing I do know, it won’t be the Land Army like your Betty.’

‘I wouldn’t join that either,’ Olive said. ‘She seems to have spent the whole winter trying to pull up frozen vegetables.

You should see her hands - they’re as rough as a navvy’s and I don’t reckon she’ll ever get the dirt out. Mind, she says it’s not so bad now spring’s come. The lambs are sweet.’

‘Well, I want to be in an armed Service,’ Gladys said. ‘I want to feel I’m fighting.’

‘But they don’t arm women, do they?’

‘They don’t yet. Who’s to say what they’ll do if the war carries on?’

The two girls were silent for a few minutes. Then Olive said quietly, ‘I was ever so sorry to hear about Graham. I quite liked him when he was coming to our house for Betty. He always had a joke.’

‘I know. Mind, I hadn’t seen much of him since he moved over to Gosport, and he used to get on my nerves when he came round to play with Bob when they were little. I thought he was a bit of a nuisance. And if it hadn’t been for him, our Bob could have been going out with your Betty. But he’d changed, Livy. Grown up, I suppose. That last night - I could see he’d been working like a slave to get people out of bombed houses. And he drove my ambulance …’ Her voice shook. ‘It should’ve been me in the hospital that night, Livy.

They were my casualties -1 should’ve taken them in. Graham shouldn’t ever have been there …’

Olive gazed at her in pity, unable think of anything to say that would comfort her friend. Dimly, she could understand the feelings that were churning through Gladys’s breast.

Guilt that Graham had been killed ‘in her place’. Relief that she was still alive, and further guilt that she felt such relief.

They coiled round inside her like a bitter snake chasing its own tail.

‘He wouldn’t have wanted you to think that way,’ she said.

‘He liked being in the Navy. He enjoyed it. He thought it was fun - all of it. He knew he might be killed, but he could still find something to laugh at, even in the raids. He wouldn’t have wanted you to be miserable over him.’

‘I know. But I can’t help it. He’s dead, and I’m alive. I feel that if I could just do something - something to make up for

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it…’ Gladys shook her head and Olive sighed. Perhaps she was right. Perhaps Service life would be the best thing for her. Perhaps the only way she could find true relief was by taking Graham’s place, by offering herself to serve in his stead.

‘I should think the Wrens would be best for you,’ she said, thinking of Graham in his matelot’s uniform. ‘The Navy, that’s what you’d be good at.’

‘D’you really think so?’ Gladys looked again at the leaflet she had obtained. It showed a girl in dark blue uniform, saluting, and across it were the words ‘Join the Wrens… and free a man for the Fleet.’

The girl had blonde hair. It was almost ginger. Almost the same colour as Graham’s.

‘It seems right to join the Navy,’ she said thoughtfully.

‘Being in Pompey.’

‘Well, it’s up to you,’ Olive said, feeling slightly alarmed.

She was fairly sure that the prospect of Gladys in the Wrens would not be at all welcome to Gladys’s parents especially to her father. He hadn’t yet stopped reminding them all that he’d never been in favour of her learning to drive, but nobody’d taken any notice of him and now look what had happened. He wouldn’t stop, either, as long as Gladys’s arm was in plaster, and probably not even when it was out.

Gladys looked at her. ‘What about you, Livy? D’you ever think of joining up?’

‘I don’t think it’s going to be a matter of thinking about it,’

Olive said. ‘I think we’re going to have to. We’ve already had to sign on for war work. It can’t be long before we’re conscripted, if we’re not already in a job.’

‘We’ve both got jobs,’ Gladys said, ‘but I suppose they don’t count those as war work.’ She looked at the leaflet again. ‘I’m going to join the Wrens,’ she said decisively. ‘I’ll apply now and I’ll go in as soon as my arm’s better. “Free a man for the Fleet.” Well, maybe I’ll be able to give ‘em one back for the one I took.’

‘Gladys, you didn’t take him,’ Olive said. ‘He was working in the raids. All the sailors were. He could’ve been killed

anywhere that night.’

‘But he wasn’t. He was killed doing my job. Anyway, it’s done now, nothing can bring him back.’ Her eyes filled with tears as she thought of the merry-eyed sailor who had knocked her mother’s door and run away when he was a small boy, who had grown into a flippant, irresponsible lad, who had become a man during the blitz and come to her aid when she needed it. ‘All I can do is try to make up for it.’

Olive was silent. Then she said, ‘I’ll talk to my Derek. I think you’re right, Glad, we ought to join up. But I can’t do something like that without talking it over with him first.’

‘Don’t you think he’ll want you to?’

‘I think he’ll say if I want to do it, I should. But I still can’t do it without talking to him. It’s different when you’re married.’

‘I suppose it is.’ Gladys looked at the leaflet again. Then she moved her shoulders as if a heavy burden had just slipped away from them. She raised her head and gave Olive a grin.

‘D’you know what? I feel better already! I know what I want to do and nobody’s going to stop me.’ She lifted her right arm in a copy of the salute being given by the girl on the leaflet. ‘I’m going to join the Navy. I’m going to be a Wren. I’m going to fight for my country and I’m going to enjoy it - just like Graham did!’

For Betty, Graham’s death had come as yet another blow.

Safety in the countryside seemed to have a bitter twist when almost everyone you knew was in danger. Since coming out here she had known three young airmen, all shot down; her great-auntie Nell, bombed in her own home; her sister, suffering the loss of her first baby; Kathy Simmons, killed with her little one in her arms; her friend Gladys, injured; and now Graham - who had said he loved her, who had wanted to marry her, who had begged her to let him make love to her wiped out in the space of a second.

How could she expect Dennis to survive? She folded the telegram that her mother had sent to tell her of Graham’s death, and stuffed it into the pocket of her dungarees. It was

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happening to everyone, everywhere.

How long before she received another yellow envelope, another telegram telling her that someone she loved was dead?

Erica came out of the cowshed and saw her leaning over the orchard gate. It was a fine morning, the June sunshine turning the dew to a pearly film over the gossamer grass. A few late lambs were under the trees with their mothers, clustered together in a comer as they plotted a new game.

‘Come on, Betty. It’s no good standing there mooning over the lambs.’