The Girls They Left Behind (8 page)

and tea brought in. There was more bread and marge, and this time most people ate it. There was milk for the children, but it was obvious that supplies were scarce. Presumably the bombing had made it difficult to get fresh food through, though there seemed to be a good store of tins and packets in the school.

At last the queue reached S, and Kathy found herself sitting in front of the trestle table with the girls one on each

side of her. The woman behind the table was wearing a floral dress and looked hot and sticky. She was rather fat, with wavy grey hair that looked as if it had been polished.

‘Name?’ She had a scratchy pen and an inkpot. ‘Address? And how many in your family?’

‘Just the two girls,’ Kathy said, and the woman looked at her sharply.

‘Husband away?’

‘He’s in the Merchant Navy.’

‘I see.’ The woman wrote down all the details. ‘You’ve managed to save your documents, that’s a good thing. Some people have got nothing, just nothing. What else is salvageable?’

Kathy stared at her.

‘What else did you bring with you? Can you get much out of the house? Furniture, clothes, utensils?’

Kathy shook her head numbly. ‘Nothing.’ She felt the ache in her throat, the hot threat of tears in her eyes. All day she’d been trying to keep them back for the sake of the children, but now her control was slipping.

‘Nothing at all?’

‘We couldn’t even get Princess Marcia,’ Muriel said suddenly. ‘And Stella’s donkey that Daddy brought home.’

The woman looked at the children, then back at Kathy.‘All day she had been interviewing people who had been bombed

out of their houses and now had nothing at all, and she had begun to harden herself towards the tragedy of it all. It was the only way to get through. But the sight of Muriel’s face, mourning her lost doll, touched her heart and brought her own tears perilously close.

‘Well, there’ll be other dolls,’ she said briskly, forcing them back. ‘The main thing now is to find you somewhere to live and give you some money. Now, you can be housed for a short while in a reception centre about half a mile away — a church hall. This one is being kept for immediate emergencies. You’ll be allowed enough money for your immediate needs such as soap and a change of clothes, and when a house is found for you, you’ll be given money for furniture.’ She opened a tin box and gave Kathy a pound note and a ten

shilling one, entering the figure in a column beside Kathy’s name. She signed the sheet of paper, then tore it off and handed it over. ‘Keep that safe. It tells us what you’ve had.

You’re allowed a total of five pounds but it’s not to be frittered away, mind. And if you’re evacuated the sum will be different, of course, since you won’t be requiring furniture.’

‘I shan’t be evacuated,’ Kathy said. ‘I want to be in Portsmouth for when my husband gets home.’

The woman pursed her lips. ‘You’ll be sending the children away, though.’

Kathy shook her head. ‘I’d rather we stayed together.’ ‘They’d be a lot safer out in the country.’

‘We’d rather be together.’ She tried a shaky smile. ‘Anyway, they say lightning never strikes twice in the same place.’

The woman sighed and shrugged. ‘Well, it’s up to you.’ She looked past Kathy at the queue behind her. ‘Next.’

Kathy folded the blankets they’d used and piled them

neatly at the end of the bed, wondering if they would be used that night by some other bomb victim. With the two little girls, she walked through the streets to the church hall, where she found another camp bed, another pile of blankets, and another pile of battered cushions. Here she was told that she was on high priority for a house and could go to look at one at once She sat down on the bed and cuddled Stella and Muriel

against her. She had done nothing all day, yet she was exhausted. Tomorrow they’d have to go out and find some cheap clothes, maybe in a second-hand shop. The grey-haired woman was right. Five pounds — even one pound ten — seemed a lot of money. But it would have to be spent carefully to buy all the things they would need.

‘Will I be able to have a new dolly?’ Muriel asked, and Kathy cuddled her closer, feeling the hard ache once again in her throat.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we’ll find you a dolly.’

Betty Chapman spent the morning cleaning the windows of

the dairy where she worked. Even though they were crisscrossed with brown paper strips, Mrs Marsh insisted that they must be kept clean. A dairy had to be hygienic.

‘She’ll have me dusting and polishing the sandbags next,’

Betty grumbled to her sister Olive as they ate the sausages and

chips their mother had prepared for their midday meal. ‘I’m sick of frittering my time away in the dairy. Any old woman could do that job. There’s better things for people like me.’

Olive sniffed and Betty felt exasperated. Although she had been married for less than a week, she seemed to think she’d gone up in the world, somehow. As if being a ‘married woman’ as she now liked to call herself, made her better than her younger sister. As if she knew more.

Well, maybe she does, but! bet it’s not all that much, Betty thought. I reckon I know as much about the facts of life as she does — except that she knows what it feels like. She gazed at Olive’s face, trying to see whether there was any difference. Her sister was certainly apt to go off in a dream these days, staring into space with her fork halfway to her mouth. Was she thinking about it then? Was she remembering her wedding night, she and Derek in bed together, thinking about what they’d done?

‘I don’t think you’ve heard a word I said,’ she exclaimed crossly. ‘If you’re not going to be a bit more chatty than this, I might as well read Tit-Bits while I have my dinner.’

‘You’ll do no such thing,’ Annie said sharply. ‘I’ll have no reading at table in this house. And it’s lunch, not dinner.’

Betty made a face. All her friends called the midday meal ‘dinner’ and thought her stuck-up when she called it ‘lunch’.

But Mum had picked up these ideas when she’d been in

service in a big house, and you couldn’t argue with her.

‘Well, it’s like a morgue,’ she grumbled. ‘Our Olive sitting there with a face as long as a wet weekend and nothing

cheerful on the wireless. And there’s been nothing but the air-raid in the shop this morning. Everyone was either in it or knows someone else who was in it. They can’t talk about anything elk.’

‘And can you blame them? There’s been people killed here, in Portsmouth, only half a mile away from this house. It could be us next time, don’t you realise that?’

Annie’s voice trembled a little. The raid had frightened her badly. All the time she’d been worrying about Olive and Ted. Olive was at Harker’s and would almost certainly get into

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their shelter, but Ted was on evening shift, taking the Ferry King across the harbour to Gosport, and she knew how much he hated it, especially since Dunkirk.

‘And how d’you think I feel?’ Olive demanded suddenly. ‘I was married last Saturday, remember? Two days married life I had, and now my Derek’s miles away down in Devon, and God knows when I’ll see him again.’ She glowered at her sister and Betty shrugged.

‘That’s not my fault is it? I didn’t tell you to get married.’ She bit her lip. She and Olive had always been good friends, never squabbled much, yet these days it seemed they were always bickering. She said more quietly, ‘I’m sorry, Livvy. I know you miss him. Same as I missed Graham when he was away. And he’ll be off again soon, once they get the ship sorted out, and I don’t know what might happen to him, do I. But that’s just what I’m saying. They’re both doing something and we’re just stuck here. I want to be doing something too. Something really important. Don’t you?’

‘I reckon it’s important to keep on going same as always,’ Olive said. The men have got to have homes to come back to and it’s up to us women to make sure they do. Look at that raid last night. Dozens of houses smashed. People have been coming into the office all morning trying to get Mr Harker to do their repairs. How d’you think he’d manage without someone to run his office?’

‘Oh, I daresay he needs someone to do all his paperwork for him,’ Betty agreed. ‘But it doesn’t have to be you, does it? Mrs Harker could do that. Anyway —’ as she saw her sister’s face darken again I wasn’t talking about you, I was talking about me. I want to do something more than count bags of eggs and make up pats of butter. Not that there’s much butter to pat these days, nor eggs to count neither.’ She laid her knife and fork together on her plate as Annie had always taught her, and sighed, ‘I wish they’d call me up into the Land Army. It’s ages since I put my name down.’

‘I don’t reckon they’re going to,’ Olive said. ‘They’ve got too many girls registering. I tell you what’s happened, with people not using their cars any more, and farmers going back to horses, all the blokes who worked as village garage 5’

mechanics have gone on the land. That’s why they don’t want the girls after all. And there’s plenty of old men, farm labourers who know what they’re doing and pleased enough

to earn themselves a bit of money. I shouldn’t think you’ll ever get called up.’

‘Well, I’ll go into one of the other Services then. The Wrens. Or the WAAFs.’ She got up and looked into the mirror that hung over the fireplace, pulling with her fingers at the golden-brown curls clustering over her head. ‘Which uniform d’you think would suit me best?’

Annie clucked with irritation. ‘Honestly, our Betty, you make me so cross at times. You don’t go into the Services just because of a pretty uniform. Anyway, I don’t expect your Dad would let you go. He’s never said yes to you joining the Land Army, you know that.’

Betty pouted. ‘He’s an old stickin-the-mud. Why shouldn’t I join the Land Army? Or anything else? It’s for my country, isn’t it? To help win the war? What’s wrong with that?’

‘Yes, why shouldn’t Bet do what she wants?’ Olive joined in. She was well aware that her father had been against ter marrying Derek before she was twenty-one, until Derek had come back from Dunkirk and made it clear he wasn’t waiting any longer. Now she was a married woman and therefore outside her father’s jurisdiction, even though she was still living at home with her parents, and she could afford to stick up for her sister. ‘If she wants to go and milk cows and dig potatoes, why not?’

Annie sighed and fetched the pudding. It was stewed apple tart with some custard made more with water than milk. The custard was thin, and a year ago she’d have felt like throwing it away, but things had changed since then. You couldn’t get the ingredients to make decent puddings and you couldn’t afford to waste what there was. You had to make do — she’d already tried making ‘banana pudding’ with parsnips and a bit of

flavouring, and some of the other economy wartime recipes they’d started putting in newspapers and giving out on the

wireless, and she had to admit that some of them weren’t bad at all.

She set the tart down on the table and cut it into portions, leaving one for Ted when he came home.

‘I don’t know, I’m sure,! she said. ‘Everything’s so different these days, I can’t keep up with it all. I thought we had our lives all nice and settled, with our Colin in the Navy and you girls growing up and getting nice jobs for a few years before you got married. Now there’s you with your man miles away, and our Bet talking about uniforms, and Colin goodness knows where …’ She shook her head. ‘It’s like you can’t be sure of anything. And then the air-raids —’ Her voice broke and she sank into her chair and put her hand up to her quivering mouth. A moment later the tears were pouring down her cheeks, and Olive and Betty stared at her and simultaneously reached out to lay their hands on her

arms.

‘Mum, don’t.’ Olive got up and went to her mother, drawing the greying head against her breast. ‘Don’t cry. It’s over now, the air-raid, and we’re all safe.’

‘Over? It’s not over. It’s only just started.’ Annie looked up at her. ‘It’s going to be like that all the time now — sirens going off when you don’t expect them, bombs exploding in the ‘next street, perhaps on our own house. Never knowing where you all are when it happens, never knowing if you’ll walk out of here one morning and not come back. And if our Betty goes off, how’ll I know she’s safe then, eh? She might be ill or hurt and it’d be days before we heard anything, days . .

‘But that’s no different from being evacuated,’ Betty said. ‘And I’d be safer out in the country —’

‘Shut up,’ Olive snapped. ‘Can’t you see she’s upset? It’s the shock, that’s what it is, it’s enough to upset anyone. It’s all right, Mum,’ she murmured, bending her head down to her mother’s. ‘It’s all right. None of us got hurt in the raid, and we won’t neither, as long as we make sure and get in the shelter every time. And I don’t reckon they’ll get through so easy again. Our lads’ll be on the watch for ‘em now, you see. They won’t let those dratted German planes in again.’

Maybe they wouldn’t, Betty thought, but she remembered seeing the planes high in the sky, flying steadily, as if

determined that nothing would stop them. She looked up and saw the fear in her sister’s eyes.

The war had been brought right to their doorstep.

‘Come on,’ Jess said as soon as dinner was finished and the washing-up done.‘We’re going down North End to see Grandma and Grandpa.’

She’d half expected an objection from the boys, but none came. They’d been unusually quiet ever since she’d arrived home from the shops to find them already back, and Tim was wearing his guilty look. She wondered what they’d been up to.

Perhaps they’d let it out on the way to North End. Annie had already been last night, to make sure that they were all right after the raid, but Jess was anxious to see them herself.

Rose pushed Maureen’s pram. Since coming back from Bridge End she had almost taken over the baby, playing with her, feeding her, washing her — though she still refused to have anything to do with nappies — and taking her for walks. Sometimes Joy Brunner came with her, but Joy was more often busy in the shop, helping her own mother.