A Soldier's Girl

by Maggie Ford

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Maggie Ford

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Read on

  Copyright

  About the Book

  In his absence, she will find her strength…

  After a childhood in poverty and leaving school to work at the age of thirteen, life is beginning to look up for Brenda Wilson. Freshly married to her handsome soldier husband, she finds her true vocation in hairdressing.

  However, Brenda is forced to give up her dreams of owning her own salon as Harry is called into service, leaving her to bring up their daughter all by herself…

  A warm-hearted and gripping saga, from the author of The Factory Girl and A Girl in Wartime

  About the Author

  Maggie Ford was born in the East End of London but at the age of six she moved to Essex, where she has lived ever since. After the death of her first husband, when she was only twenty-six, she went to work as a legal secretary until she remarried in 1968. She has a son and two daughters, all married; her second husband died in 1984.

  She has been writing short stories since the early 1970s.

  Also by Maggie Ford

  The Soldier’s Bride

  A Mother’s Love

  Call Nurse Jenny

  A Woman’s Place

  The Factory Girl

  A Girl in Wartime

  For my children, Janet, John and Clare

  Chapter One

  Balanced on a wooden chair brought up from the kitchen for better stability, Brenda Wilson stared down at the hem of the long white dress she had on.

  ‘It’s not right, Mum. It’s dipping all to one side.’

  Her mother did not look up from inserting pins around the fine hem ready for handstitching. ‘Well, if yer keep leaning over like that, then it will, won’t it? Stand up straight.’

  Obediently Brenda lifted her head, pulled back her shoulders and stretched her slender waist, returning to her true height of five foot four inches. Even so, looking at herself in the long mirror of the wardrobe, she saw not the light brown hair that hung in loose waves about her shoulders, nor the oval face with its blue eyes, but the still-offending hemline.

  ‘It’s still dipping,’ she accused.

  Her mother looked up at her briefly, then sat back on her heels to survey her work. ‘Where?’

  ‘On the left.’

  ‘It’s because yer still looking down. It’s the way yer standing. Yer’ll ’ave ter stand up straight in church next week.’

  ‘I am up straight.’

  ‘You ain’t. Yer all one-sided, Bren. Yer keep going all saggy. Pull yer left shoulder up a bit.’ Brenda obliged.

  ‘That’s better. See, it’s level now.’

  Brenda frowned. ‘Stand like this in church and people will think I’m deformed.’

  ‘Course they won’t. And stop frowning. Yer supposed to be ’appy on yer special day.’

  ‘I will be,’ retorted Brenda. ‘On my day. But not with one shoulder stuck higher than the other.’

  ‘Not if yer walk properly.’

  Before her daughter could make any further protests, the door of the poky little bedroom she shared with her sister, Vera, burst open, admitting the girl, two years younger than she and very like her in looks except that at this moment her lips were a tight line of pique.

  ‘Bren! Take a look at this blinking ’eaddress.’

  She’d been downstairs trying the thing on over and over again, all the time moaning and exclaiming. They could hear the infuriated squeaks through the thin walls of the house in a series of high-pitched oh’s and ow’s. Mum had grinned several times at the sounds but had said nothing, knowing how tense her older daughter was three days before her wedding.

  From her elevated position on the chair, Brenda glared down at the intruder. She had her own problems with this blessed hemline Mum kept insisting was all right. The bridal gown, in a sleek white satin, had been bought cheap in Roman Road market two Saturdays ago. Mum had altered it to fit, and now it looked a picture but for the blessed dip to the left side of the hem.

  ‘What’s wrong with the headdress?’ she demanded and saw Vera’s pretty little nose wrinkle in disgust.

  ‘I hate it, that’s what’s wrong. It looks daft, pink flowers, I look like a bloomin’ village maiden. And pink don’t go with me fair hair at all.’

  ‘You said you was happy with pink when we was in the shop. I did say blue, but you wouldn’t listen.’ They’d gone there again last Saturday to get her veil and tiara of wax orange blossom as well as the bridesmaids’ dresses and headdresses, circlets of artificial pink flowers. Posies to match would be coming on the morning of the wedding. ‘We can’t start changing it all now. It’s too late.’

  ‘It looked all right in the shop,’ Vera complained. ‘Under their electric light it looked lovely. But in daylight it looks awful, me with me fair hair. All right for you – all in yer white, yer bouquet all cream carnations an’ lilies an’ fern. But me . . .’ Running out of steam, she broke off and yanked the headdress from her head, probably for the sixth time, to glare down at it.

  Had Vera’s hair been a touch darker, as Brenda’s was, there’d have been no cause for complaint, but she seemed to have forgotten it was she who had gone overboard for the pretty shade, gazing in rapture at the other bridesmaid, their cousin Sheila, on whom pink looked quite stunning against all that dark brown hair. Seeing herself in Sheila she had forgotten how much lighter her own hair was.

  Trust Vera to be awkward. She had been so adamant in the shop that this was what she’d wanted. And to come over all prima donna at the eleventh hour, or almost, was exasperating. If they’d been well off, it might have been possible to go back and get something else. But they weren’t well off, none of them, and she and Harry were getting married on a shoestring as most everyone did in Bow or anywhere else in the East End of London. All right, Deacons in Roman Road was no Harrods, but he stocked stuff just as nice as any posh shop, and certainly far cheaper. But even he wouldn’t go changing purchases after they’d been bought and paid for. At shops like that you paid up and took pot luck which was why Mum had had to alter it slightly, taking it in at the waist and lifting it at the shoulders, just as she’d had to take in both bridesmaids’ dresses at the waist.

  Brenda’s solution to her sister’s dilemma was brief and impatient. ‘You could dye yer hair a bit darker.’

  ‘What?’ the reply was flung back at her. ‘I don’t want to go darker.’

  ‘It’s just for the day. You can use the stuff what washes out.’

  Brenda worked at Alfio’s, an Italian hairstylist’s in Bishopsgate. She had been there six years, since she was fif
teen. Before that, leaving school at not quite fourteen, she had worked in a cake factory, which she had hated. Her life, she had felt, was worth more than sitting at a bench slopping cream on the lower half of an endlessly moving belt of Victoria sandwiches or packing almond slices into boxes. Her fingers were dexterous, her mind lively; her leanings inclined towards the creative. She’d ambitiously and innocently enquired after any possible vacancies for a starter at Alfio’s, which she had been passing at the time, to be told in very good English with only the slightest Italian accent that he was taking on no one. However, seeing potential in her presentable appearance and eager expression, he had said he’d be willing to train her.

  His next words, ‘For which I will require a fee for two years of training,’ had swept excitement right out of her system.

  Hiding shock and disappointment she had asked how much this fee would be and if she would get paid. He had beamed at her naivety (she was to find out that he was a man who beamed at everything even as he scolded and upbraided and criticised) and said blithely that she didn’t get paid, and at her bleak expression added that the London Academy of Hairdressing charged three times as much as he. At his fee, she’d blanched, seeing all her hopes disappear – she with no money, no savings, a fourteen-year-old with no job. By then her wish to be a hairstylist had so overwhelmed her that she had hurried home on the bus and run through the streets to speak to her parents, to beg them help her, so sure that they would.

  Her dad’s first words had been, ‘’Ow can we pay that kind of money?’ Her world collapsed around her and she hadn’t been able to eat for a week. Her parents became thoughtful, then troubled. She caught them talking together in low whispers. Then her dad had said, ‘We might just be able ter manage it, but if yer don’t work ’ard an’ make a fist of it, then yer out! Don’t let us down, Bren. We ain’t rollin’ in dough, yer know.’

  His only stipulation had been that he pay her tuition fee on a monthly basis rather than as the one whole down payment Mr Alfio Fichera had demanded. To this day, Brenda never could fathom out why the man accepted the terms, but he did.

  Those two years had nearly crippled her parents, skimping and scraping for her, and she spent the time alternately overwhelmed by gratitude, consumed by guilt, knowing what they had sacrificed for her, and fighting the jealousy it provoked, especially from Vera who, if denied some small thing, would hold Brenda up as an example of favouritism.

  Once her two years were up, she’d stayed on at Alfio’s as a qualified hairstylist and his chief assistant. She could have gone up West and got a position with a high-class salon but she always felt she owed Mr Fichera a debt of gratitude for his generosity in taking her on as he had in the way Dad had stipulated. When she had told him that she was getting married and would obviously be leaving, he had said sadly, ‘What a fool. What a waste. A single woman could have her own salon in time – become so very successful. But there . . . If ever you need any advice, any time, come to me.’

  He was right, it could be looked on as a waste. Between Mr Fichera and Dad she reckoned she’d become as good as any top-class hairstylist. With her tutor, she had Dad to thank. How he ever managed to keep her those two years she would never know.

  Like most people round here, they were far from well off. Her father was employed by a small firm making record and photograph albums; his money wasn’t so bad, though with two girls and two boys to feed, rent to pay, clothing and all the other bits and pieces that ate into a wage, they still lived somewhat close to the bone. A week in Margate in August on three days’ paid holiday money, with Bank Holiday Monday as an extra paid day, took a year to save up for. They would stay at a boarding house, and Mum would buy the food for the landlady to cook for their breakfast and evening meal. If it rained, that was too bad. You made the best of it; guests were allowed back only for a meal and for bedtime. But Dad had always made sure they had that holiday. During the worst of the Depression, he had been luckier than some. With millions out of work his boss had kept him, painting the factory when no work came in.

  Even so, there had been times when Mum and Dad had feared they might have to find somewhere to live with a lower rent. Brenda remembered praying until she cried that they wouldn’t have to. She’d had all her friends here, and her school. The thought of changing schools, being among strangers, had been too awful to contemplate.

  It hadn’t come about, but she’d been dragged out of school at thirteen and a half to work in the cake factory so that her small wages could help to boost the family income. She was never allowed to forget how lucky she had been to secure a job when so many were on the dole.

  That was in the past now. In 1937, things were at last looking up. Even so, getting married on the low wages Harry earned as packer in a warehouse was still proving tough. But she was proud of him. He’d managed to pay the holding fee on a flat above a shop in Bow Road. It wasn’t much – living room, kitchen, bedroom, boxroom, access by an external wrought-iron staircase, a backyard toilet to be shared by them and the shop’s proprietor. But she’d have her own home, hers and Harry’s, their own little love nest.

  Just under a week and she’d walk down the aisle of St Mary’s on Dad’s arm, all solemn, to stand beside Harry. She’d return on Harry’s arm, all smiles. The congregation, his family one side, hers the other, and friends, would be congratulating them both, following them out for photographs, and she would no longer be Brenda Wilson but Mrs Harry Hutton.

  She recalled the first time of seeing him. She and a group of girls had been outside a chip shop exchanging banter with a group of boys. Then he’d asked if she’d like to go to the pictures. Taken by his handsome looks, she’d said yes, something about him making her hope it wouldn’t be just a fling. It hadn’t been. After three dates with him, a feeling began to stir that got her mulling over a new name for herself, Brenda Hutton, hearing in her head the nice ring of it. She’d even written it down on bits of paper, screwing them up afterwards and throwing them away in case, discovered, she’d be laughed at. The mention of his name would bring twinges of excitement in much the same way as she had once shivered to the names of Tyrone Power and Clark Gable.

  And now, come Saturday, she would be Brenda Hutton forever, his ring on her finger, one thought only in her head, that they leave as soon as possible for their own little home and make love to each other as man and wife, in fact to make love to each other for the first time ever.

  Underneath that chirpy exterior he had displayed on their first meeting, Harry had proved to be a shy person. For all his hearty attitude with his mates, in with the best of them for ogling the girls, once on his own with her he’d been uncertain of himself. So much so that though she’d felt sympathy for him, it had added to his charm rather than lessening it. But once he had regained his self-confidence, he proved himself to be as strong-minded as any man, and she loved him for it, knowing he’d make her happy. Every girl needed an assertive man for a husband.

  There was, however, one fly in the ointment of all this contentment – leaving her job. After Thursday, having Friday off to prepare for the wedding, she wouldn’t be going back. It was perhaps her only regret.

  ‘It’s a respectable job,’ she’d pleaded with Harry. ‘Not like working in a factory.’ But he’d been adamant.

  ‘I’m not ’aving me wife going ter work. We ain’t that ’ard up and if I can’t provide I’d rather not be wedded. I ain’t ’aving people pointing a finger at me saying yer got ter work ter ’elp keep us. No, Bren, once yer married ter me, your place is ’ere, in the ’ome. That’s as it should be.’

  She was proud of him for saying that, not expecting her to keep him while he loafed as some men did. And she looked forward to playing housewife, meeting other housewives. This was the dream of nearly all single working girls, to get married and never have to go out to work again. They would look enviously at their married counterparts and long for the day when they too could get their man’s breakfast, see him off to work before settling down
in their kitchen with a nice quiet cup of tea and a leisurely cigarette. Then they would flick a duster around their new wedding presents and wash up their gleaming new crockery and saucepans, also wedding presents. No more taking orders from a boss. No more rushing off to catch the workman’s bus. No more clock-watching apart from timing the evening meal. Utter bliss. Every girl’s dream. Yet Brenda couldn’t help viewing the loss of her job with a small pang of regret. She loved hairdressing but she was giving it all up. In an odd way she felt obsolete, left behind, as if the world were going on without her and someone else would take her place.

  Of course the friends she’d made there would come to her wedding if they could. Mr Fichera would definitely be there. One or two of the girls might visit her new home, which she would parade proudly before them. But eventually they would stop coming, get on with their own lives, befriend the new person who would take over from her. In time even her name would be forgotten as if she had never been. It was inevitable.

  Oddly disconsolate, she turned her head away from Vera and Mum and glanced out of the window. From here she could see almost the whole way along Trellis Street. Not that there was much of it to see. A dozen or so houses stood on each side ending at the archway over which the Great Eastern ran, deafening the ears with rattling trains that boomed over the empty space below and filled the street with stinking smoke. Houses were terraced, with tiny front gardens that grew little and that blackened by soot from the trains. Each front door was set into a dark brick porch; beside it protruded a single, slightly bayed downstairs window, its stone mullions also blackened by soot; two upper windows were also stone-framed, unpretty, without character, each exactly like its neighbour, front and back, as with every other street in this district. Maybe it was better than Shoreditch or Whitechapel or Stepney or many other East End areas, but it still looked dull and dingy.

  At the moment the street was full of kids. August meant they were on holiday and all seemed to be here in this one street. Brenda took a deep breath and did her best to brighten up and endure her mother’s attentions to the hem.