The Poppy Factory (23 page)

Our handkerchiefs were already soaked with tears by the last chime of Big Ben. All the men took off their caps and we bowed our heads for the two minute silence, which seemed longer and more profound even than last year. From where we stood, it wasn’t entirely clear what happened next (someone said the King pressed a button), but after that the flags fell down from the Cenotaph and we could see the enormous stone column reaching up into the sky. Once the coffin and the procession had moved off, Ma and me joined the queue waiting to lay their wreaths at the foot of the monument. We only had two modest bunches of flowers, with ordinary brown labels tied to them on which Ma had written Johnnie and Ray’s names and dates, and it took us nearly three hours, but she was that determined to get there I reckon we probably would’ve queued all night if that’s what it took.

Alfie didn’t see any of this. He was part of the guard of honour on both sides of the streets all the way to Westminster Abbey. After the burial service proper inside the Abbey, he said, another enormous queue formed outside, of people come from all over England to see the actual grave. It’s curious to think that most of them will hardly even notice the tombs of the kings and queens and other famous people buried nearby.

As they were preparing to leave, Alfie exchanged a few words with an old woman in the queue who’d spent two days travelling from the far north of Scotland and was preparing to wait all night if necessary. She was holding a bunch of withered flowers she’d picked from a garden her son had planted when he was only six. Now the boy was lost somewhere in the mud of France.

I told him how much the day had meant to Ma. Although she’d wept a fair bit during the day, it was when we were sitting down with a cuppa in her little parlour that the tears really started to fall.

‘Don’t mind me,’ she’d said. ‘It’s relief, more than sadness. I know it’s peculiar, but it doesn’t matter who that soldier was, he represents all of them. So now I know my boys are safe. I can sleep in peace.’

That pretty much says it all.

Tuesday 7th December

I was right. For a couple of weeks now I’ve been feeling strange: dog-tired and a bit queasy. At first I put it down to a touch of the flu but it didn’t get any better or worse, and now my monthlies have failed to appear. I must be expecting!

Alfie is over the moon of course, and was ready to go down The Nelson to ‘wet the baby’s head’ that very moment, but I persuaded him to hold his tongue for a couple more weeks – to Christmas, say – till we announce it, just in case of mishaps. I’m not even going to tell Ma and Pa, not just yet.

I just find myself humming all the time, any old tune that pops into my head, whatever fits the rhythm of the machine I’m working on, imagining the day when our little one will arrive and complete our family. Although I know that bringing up a baby is no bed of clover, I feel so sure that this little scrap of new life will help to put all the trials and problems of the past few years behind us.

Freda will be so excited when I tell her, but I’ll have to bite my tongue for a few weeks longer.

Monday 13th December

What a weekend! All day Saturday and Sunday it blew a terrible blizzard. About a foot of snow fell and it turned the world into a kind of wonderland. Of course the roads and pavements are very slippery and it’s difficult to walk, especially for Alfie. He even resorted to using a stick today, which he normally hates, being too proud to admit to his false leg. The papers say it will probably go on snowing for the rest of the week.

Sunday 26th December

It’s been a wonderful Christmas. My goodness, what a long way we’ve come since last year. Alfie was still stuck in France and we had no idea of the ordeal he was about to endure, Pa could open the shop only two days a week because of rationing, Mr Barker’s business was on its knees, Ma was withered into a shadow, grieving so terribly for the boys.

Now, Alfie is home and back at work, earning good money and loving the freedom of driving Mr B’s van. Appleby’s Fine Butchers has had a bumper Christmas – they sold nearly a hundred turkeys this year. People seem to have decided that it was time to celebrate, making up for what they’ve been missing the past five years.

Mr Barker seems to have more work than he and Alfie can cope with, mostly in the second-hand furniture line. ‘When the rich start buying new, you get a better quality of used,’ he told us over Christmas dinner. ‘Now even the common folk are taking more pride in their homes. It’s the perfect equation of supply and demand.’ He’s even invested in a proper warehouse now, rather than the old lock-up he’d been using to store goods during the war.

Ma is a new person, and seems at last to have found peace with herself. No more shrine in the boys’ old bedroom, no languishing in bed half the day complaining of headaches, and no more visits to Mr Newsom, thank heavens. On the boys’ birthdays and the anniversaries of their deaths she places a vase of flowers by their photographs in the parlour, and these small acts seem to ease her sadness. She is cooking proper meals, and eating healthily, and has even signed up as a volunteer street collector for a charity that looks after war handicapped. It’s given her a new sense of purpose, helping the living instead of grieving for the dead, she says.

And me? Well, I could not be happier. Alfie and me are making good money and can buy ourselves the little luxuries we could only have dreamed of in the past. We are talking about moving to a bigger flat with a second bedroom, and planning a week in Brighton in June or July, before the baby arrives. He’s even hoping to save up enough for a small motor – more likely a motorcycle with a sidecar – so that we can go touring with the baby. I told him not to get too many big ideas because we need to put a bit away for when I have to give up work.

Everyone in the Appleby and Barker families is cock-a-hoop about the baby, especially Ma, who said she’d have to start knitting right away. Pa was a bit gruff, as usual, but Alfie says he was proudly buying rounds in the pub at lunchtime today and enjoying the joshing he got about becoming a grandpa with pipe and slippers etc. So I reckon he’s pretty pleased too.

Freda said she was over the moon for me, although her face told a different story. She and Claude have been engaged for more than a year now, and there’s still no date for a wedding. To make it worse, he keeps disappearing for weeks at a time, on business in Europe, he says, and I’m really starting to wonder if he has another woman somewhere.

She would be heartbroken if it all fell apart, and I long to warn her that he’s never looked like a very safe bet in my eyes, but she won’t hear a single word against him and sounds off at me if I so much as utter a word of doubt, so I hold my tongue.

BOOK FIVE

Rose Barker - PRIVATE

Saturday 1st January 1921

Spent New Year’s Eve in The Nelson again, with me in a strop because Alfie flat refused to go dancing at the Palais with Freda and Claude.

I had so wanted to wear the new dress with the fringe around the hem that Ma had made me for Christmas. Alfie said I could wear it down the pub, couldn’t I, and I got even more angry because the whole point of the fringe is that it jiggles around when you dance, and would just look plain stupid in a boring old pub. So the evening didn’t start off well and got worse, as he got more drunk and I got more grumpy. I didn’t feel like drinking but stuck it out till midnight, because I didn’t want tongues wagging, and came home straight after the Auld Lang Syne.

Also, a bit of a dampener: in the pub was a woman I know slightly from Mitchell’s – she works in the office. When she heard everyone raising their glasses to our ‘new arrival’ she came over to congratulate me.

‘When’s it due?’ she asked and when I told her August she said, ‘Take my advice, dearie, keep it quiet at the factory till you start to show.’

When I asked what she meant, she told me that Mr Mitchell didn’t like pregnant girls working there because he said they got clumsy and it was dangerous on the machines. There’d been an incident a few years ago when someone put a needle through her finger and they’d discovered later she was three months gone. Ever since then, the boss had given women their cards just as soon as he learned of their condition.

‘Is that legal, to sack you just because you’re expecting?’ I asked her and she said there was absolutely no law against it, so I thanked her for the advice and said I’d keep quiet and hope for the best.

Wednesday 16th February

The papers are reporting that unemployment in Britain has topped a million, and it’s not just the men out of work, it’s their families who’re affected too, so at least four million must be on the breadline. It doesn’t bear thinking about. The government’s going to increase dole money but that’s scant consolation for men who are keen and willing to work.

Alfie and I were talking about the news this evening and I said, ‘At least your pa and mine are self-employed so they don’t have to worry about being laid off.’ He looked at me as though I was stupid and pointed out that of course it affects them too: the more people out of work, the less they are likely to spend in Pa’s shop and on the sort of things Mr Barker sells. How naïve I am about such things – I wish I could have spent more time learning about today’s world in school, instead of ox-bow lakes and the Wars of the Roses. Still, they did teach me to read and write for which I am very grateful – if I couldn’t write this diary I’d go mad, bottling up my thoughts and not being able to express them.

I’ve stopped feeling sick and tired and I’m really starting to enjoy being pregnant. But when my belly starts to swell – as it will soon – I’ll have to be careful when putting on my overalls in the factory changing room. Gossip flies around that place like a swarm of ants in June.

Easter Saturday 26th March

It was only last week Freda and me were having a giggle about the first ever ‘family planning’ service that’s just opened in north London and how it ought to be available for all women, not just the married ones. Finding you’re pregnant when you’re married might be a problem if you already have too many children, though not the end of the world. Getting knocked up when you’re
not
married – now that’s a real disaster, we both agreed.

But now the disaster’s happened: Freda has missed her period, and is feeling the same as I was, with tender titties and feeling sick in the mornings. My heart sank, because my first thought was: ‘Now she’ll
have
to marry that creep Claude.’ But she doesn’t seem to be distressed about it at all. In fact she’s positively over the moon and just says they’ll have to get married sooner and make their wedding a simpler affair than she’d imagined.

I asked all the right questions, trying to sound excited for her: ‘when’s it due?’, and ‘do you want a boy or a girl?’ and she twittered on about how being pregnant has made her feel ‘fulfilled’. Filled she certainly will be, in a few months’ time.

‘You’re the first person I’ve told,’ she whispered, even though we were alone in the flat.

‘You haven’t told Claude yet?’ I tried to keep the astonishment out of my voice. ‘Don’t you think he should be the first to know?’

She just said he was away on business and she’ll tell him when he comes back next weekend. She’s sure he will be ‘thrilled to bits’ (her words), but I’m not convinced. One thing is for certain, her parents are going to be
furious,
and if I were in her shoes I’d be quaking: her pa has a ferocious temper. Alfie’s going to be hopping mad, too. She made me swear not to tell him and I promised to leave that pleasure to her.

When I asked where they were going to live she said Claude had his eye on a house off Dulwich Park and I nearly choked on my tea.

‘Dulwich Park? That’s where the toffs live. However can you afford it?’

She said Claude’s businesses were doing really well, and he wanted to live in a ‘nice area’. The words slipped out before I could stop them. ‘Meaning he thinks this isn’t a
nice
area?’

She got a bit flustered and said of course it was, but surely I had to agree it would be nice to have electric lights and a water closet inside the house, and a bit more than just a back-to-back yard for their kiddie to play in? I was about to retort that we’d been happy enough, playing out in the streets with the other children, hadn’t we? But I held my tongue because the truth is that my irritation is really more to do with envy. Alfie and me do have a water closet, at least, but electricity would be nice, and of course I would like a proper garden for my children to play in.

Friday 1st April

The coal miners in the north have called a ‘strike’ for a fortnight’s time and the government’s called a ‘state of emergency’ which would allow them to take over the mines if the miners downed tools. Everyone’s very worried because there would be no fuel to make electricity or run the railways, the country would grind to a standstill, and I’m afraid we might be laid off from the factory.

Saturday 16th April

Panic over. The miners couldn’t get support from other workers so they called off their strike. But the rumblings are still rolling around: people are very unhappy about unemployment and low wages. Thank heavens Alfie and me both have jobs.

Monday 2nd May

My twenty-first birthday – it should have been a day for celebration but it didn’t exactly turn out that way. I decided not to tell anyone until afterwards, so as not to spoil the party. Ma had cooked a delicious fruit cake and invited us both round for tea after work. When we arrived, she and Pa presented their gifts – a lovely box of Pears soap and a new rug for our hallway – and Alfie produced the best surprise of all: a letter confirming our booking at the guest house in Brighton for a week in June.

Although I did my best to put on a cheerful face and pretend that all was well, he soon spotted that something was wrong and whispered, ‘What’s up?’ I muttered that I’d tell him later but Ma overheard and said, ‘You’re not yourself, Rose, I can tell. What is it?’