A Soldier's Girl

by Maggie Ford

  There had been people under there, she learned later, two, a middle-aged couple, and only the woman had been dug out alive. Each time she passed the place after that she thought of the man, whoever he was, of his widow, how they’d gone about their daily lives the day before a bomb claimed one of them. It broke her heart and made her think that it could one night be her and Addie under a pile of rubble. What an irony if Harry, a soldier, got made a widower. It almost made her think twice about going down into that cellar again.

  Yet it was so depressing pushing Addie’s pram through an acrid stink of burning hanging on the chill morning air, seeing the expressionless faces of those she passed. All this propaganda about how Londoners ‘could take it’, with pictures of them grinning through soot-grimed faces, the thumbs-up sign and the ubiquitous mug of steaming char, was a fiction. The real truth was there in those faces that she passed, betraying nothing to outside eyes of whether a loved one lay in some hospital ward or hospital morgue, of whether house and belongings had gone or where they were going to stay now, if they needed new ration books and identity cards. Mum had always taken these essentials in a little American cloth satchel down into the shelter with her. ‘Yer never know,’ she’d say, as if they were worth more to her than her life.

  Gas masks sometimes appeared to be the only remaining possession as a couple poked through the ruins of what had once been a home, faces plastered with grey dust making them look inscrutable. Now and again one would clamber down from the rubble with a piece of furniture while other members of the family continued to pick through the debris.

  Trying to avert her eyes for fear of being thought to be staring, she always felt glad to reach home. Into her third week of this, the arrangement had become impossible. Tomorrow she would explain how hard it was getting to keep her business running and that she must take her chances in her own place. This was true. It was hard enough trying to get the hairdressing stuff that wartime had made scarce, let alone having to rush back almost too weary from lack of sleep to give proper attention to her ladies.

  There was John Stebbings too. He had nodded silently when she had seen him that first week with her excuses ready. His apology for what had happened had been abject, taking all the blame upon himself.

  She’d burst out, ‘No, it was me, my fault, I shouldn’t ever have let it go that far.’

  ‘And that is the reason why you’re staying with your parents,’ he had stated.

  For all her protests that it wasn’t, he knew. Then, a couple of days ago, seeing her returning that morning as he was clearing up bits of debris from the backyard after ARP duty that night, he asked how she was, commenting that she looked tired and drawn.

  ‘I am tired,’ she told him flatly as she lifted Adele from the pram and began putting the pram in the shed. That done, she made to hoist the child in her arms to take her up the stairs.

  ‘Here, let me,’ he said, taking Addie from her.

  ‘No, John, it’s all right – really it is.’ Using only his first name came quite naturally to her lips. So far she’d always tagged on his surname when thinking of him but knowing what had happened between them, unplanned or not, it now seemed silly. The times she had raged at herself for letting it go that far, yet the times the yearning returned to be with him again.

  Using his first name made her look at him. She found him regarding her with a light in those dark eyes that seemed to probe her soul so deeply that she could actually feel it.

  ‘I’ve decided not to go round my mother’s any more,’ she said, trying to keep her voice steady. ‘I’ve missed . . .’ She caught herself in time and stammered inadequately, ‘. . . being down in the basement.’

  Her voice had quavered and the expression on his face told her that he knew it was he whom she was missing. Before she could stop herself, her face crumpled and seconds later she was committing herself utterly. ‘And I missed you as well.’

  All that resolve to be friendly but distant, blown to the wind. Those silly butterflies had started up in her stomach all over again, no matter how she commanded them to be still. They still fluttered at each thought of him, no matter how she told herself to be firm and think of Harry, to concentrate her mind on him. It was in fact already being concentrated by the news of the North African campaign, as was everyone else’s.

  Chapter Seventeen

  After the easy-going Italians whom the Eighth Army had so easily overrun, Rommel’s Afrika Korps, specially trained for desert warfare, had recaptured Benghazi. To the despair of everyone at home, British and Australian forces had had to fall back and were now being besieged at Tobruk.

  Harry’s next letter too was different. Written around mid-April, it told of an end to those good times in Cairo with booze and belly-dancers which Brenda swore had been the initial cause of her being practically thrown into the arms of John Stebbings. But she’d been lonely and in a way angered by the wonderful time Harry kept describing to her while here at home she had been enduring all the violence the blitz could throw at her. Now she regretted her impulsive behaviour.

  This letter, after having hoped she was OK, had gone on to tell of a night patrol he’d done, of freezing desert nights, the dark so absolute that the stars seemed, ‘only an arm’s length above your head’, and to give a graphic description of his platoon’s silent, stealthy advance, rifles held ready, how they’d sink down on one knee at some hostile shadow or movement, mostly imagined with their eyes hardly able to probe two feet ahead ‘playing tricks on us all’, then the inky darkness suddenly rent by a Very light telling everyone that there really was an enemy not all that far ahead.

  How it had ever been passed by the censor was beyond her as her skin prickled into goosebumps on reading it. Could the blitz ever compare to what he described, the ordeal of creeping ever nearer a living yet unseen enemy, knowing that the crack of a rifle could send a bullet straight into your chest, your last glimpse of the world a crack, a flash, before oblivion darker than any desert night blotted out all things?

  She felt humbled and frightened, and vowed to put a stop to her association with John, until another letter came almost on top of the last one, once again joyful and full of well-being. Not that she didn’t feel relieved.

  . . . We’ve had a crack at the buggers at last. Went on a patrol and hit a German position. All hell broke loose and you wouldn’t believe the mayhem, Bren, us surrounded by machine gun-fire. I just can’t describe how them flashes coming out of the total darkness hurts your eyes and after the silence just before, how the noise of gunfire deafens you. Anyway, we done our job. We got back to our company position just as it was coming up to dawn. That’s where I’m writing this from now. We’re smoking ourselves silly and tearing into our water ration to make endless cups of char. I think we needed it. I don’t suppose we’ll be going forward again for a couple of days.

  The rest of the letter was about how he missed her, how he wished he was home lying in bed beside her, asked how Addie was, again as he always did, said that she must be growing fast and probably wouldn’t know him when he finally came home. ‘God knows when that will be, this bloody war looks like it’s going to go on forever.’

  He asked how she was, how she was bearing up under the air raids, expressed his concern for her, wished he could be there to protect her, then returned once more to the patrol he’d been sent on. No doubt it seemed different in retrospect, but he wrote as if it had all been a great game. Didn’t he realise how easily he might have been wounded, or killed? At one and the same time it terrified her and angered her. Didn’t it occur to him that she could be made a widow, Addie made fatherless? If only he had told her that it did instead of writing like a small boy scoring his first goal in a school football team.

  Harry wrote of his conviction of war going on forever, and it seemed the Blitz would go on forever too, not letting up until every last home was flattened, at least in East London. If anything, with the coming of April, raids had got worse with fewer and shorter lulls between each
onslaught which meant fewer chances for John to come and find out how she and Addie were doing. Since her return to shelter in the basement, the opportunity to be together for any length of time had occurred three times, and probably just as well. It didn’t do, this longing to be with another man when being a dutiful wife to her own man away fighting was what she should be. It was unhealthy. It was wrong.

  Yet at the first sound of the door opening at the top of the stairs, she would leap up in her bed, leaving Addie still fast asleep, and as the tall slim figure in its dark boiler suit, tin hat and respirator pack appeared, she’d sit there tense and expectant, knowing what the outcome of this visit would be, hating it yet with heart thumping heavily and stomach all a-churn wanting him to come to her, have their lips meet, have the guilt melt in a need to be held, to be loved, to touch and be touched, to know that he wanted her as much as she wanted him.

  Ironically it was when an attack was at its height that she most needed him with her and then of course he was given no time to come to her.

  All through April they had become increasingly severe. The sixteenth had been the worst so far, with no let-up all night. A hundred thousand tons of high explosive had been dropped, she learned next morning. John had dashed down in panic to see if she and Addie were all right seconds after something fell very near; the whole building had shaken, Addie had awoken screaming, both of them as well as the bed had got showered in dust from the roof, several book shelves toppling at once with a resounding crash scattering their contents everywhere.

  Holding Addie to her, her own heart racing and her face so blenched that it felt cold, she broke out with a cry of relief as minutes later John’s head appeared through the door gazing down at them in concern.

  ‘Are you OK? Are you hurt?’

  She shook her head, too stunned to speak. He’d withdrawn, calling back, ‘Must go! It’s chaos down the road!’ leaving her feeling forsaken for all she knew it was wrong to feel that way. He was needed elsewhere this night. Full of fear that he could get hurt, even killed, she found herself unable to think beyond the fact that she might never see him again.

  Sitting there, praying he’d stay safe, praying for herself and Addie as with every explosion her body leapt, cowering protectively over her daughter as more dust showered down and around the two of them, it was the longest night of her life. But then it must have felt like the longest night of everyone’s life as savage attack after savage attack ripped East London to shreds until it seemed nothing could possibly be left standing when she finally emerged in daylight – if she emerged at all.

  Somehow, in her basement surrounded by splintered bookcases and scattered books, when finally the raiders departed and the sweet single note of the all-clear filtered down to her, the heaviest debris to have fallen on her and Addie had been only the age-blackened dust from the wood beams.

  Since Addie had dropped off into exhausted sleep, her little face streaked with dirt and tears, Brenda chose to sit on beside her rather than go up and see what damage had been done. At that moment she did not want to set eyes on another piece of splintered wood, broken tile, smashed window and, by the way it sounded last night, flattened homes. She even wondered if her own flat still stood above her. Or had the entire top part gone, leaving her no roof at all over her head?

  If the worst came to the worst, she could somehow live down here in the basement, like a sewer rat perhaps, with no daylight. Depressing but, it appeared after last night, safe. She was, but was he? All night she had felt sure he was, yet underneath convinced that something might have happened to him, that later would come someone to say he was dead.

  Sitting on the edge of her bed, one hand smoothing the fair hair of the sleeping Adele, Brenda experienced a surge of terror as the door to the basement opened, followed immediately by utter relief as John in a begrimed boiler suit came wearily down the stairs.

  Perhaps it was that very leap from terror to relief that stayed her from jumping up to greet him, as though it had drained every vestige of energy from her. She watched him take off his tin hat, ease off his respirator pack, and come to sit on the edge of the bed beside her, her only response then being to automatically shift along a little to make room.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Sorry I couldn’t . . .’

  ‘You weren’t able to, I know,’ she said, finding her voice.

  He drew her to him, taking her in his arms so gently that she burst into tears.

  He was rocking her, his voice soothing, saying over and over, ‘There now, darling, there now, it’s all over,’ patiently waiting until she was finally able to pull herself together.

  ‘I needed you so much,’ she said finally.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘But so much was going on . . .’

  ‘I know,’ she replied wearily and lifting her face had him kiss her tenderly.

  As on every time before, making love was not a comfortable thing, more a frantic desire to satisfy a craving; no laughter, no real joy, indeed no light-heartedness and quiet pleasure as there would have been with Harry. The whole thing remained fraught by guilt after they finally parted in silence, each with their own thoughts that could not be shared. It was disquieting, and as with every other time, Brenda told herself that it must cease – she couldn’t go on like this, being disloyal to Harry.

  Harry’s next letter helped in making up her mind. Arriving several days into May, it again told of being sent into combat.

  A short, grubby note, that’s all it was. Full of his misery in being in the desert half-suffocated by the heat and stinging sand of what he called the khamsin, a wind that blew for days, sometimes weeks, without a break, robbing every man of the desire even to think.

  But it don’t matter to them – we’ve bin ordered forward and I dread to think what the outcome’s going to be. All I want is to come home and be with you, Bren. I love you, Bren, and I don’t want not to ever see you again. Kiss Addie for me. Tell her about her dad.

  Was it her imagination or was there a ring of finality in what he’d written? Had he some premonition? Fear for him gripped her as she read and reread, hardly able to see for tears. Here she was concerned over the safety of a man she’d so foolishly allowed herself to become infatuated by when the very man she’d married out of pure love was himself in such immediate danger that she might never see him again.

  How had she got to this – a grubby affair with someone else? All of a sudden that was how it felt. She felt ashamed. But this was it. No more. She would put her cards on the table, say to John that it couldn’t continue. If need be she’d sleep upstairs in her flat and take a chance on the ceiling collapsing on top of her. She rejected the idea of going back to sharing her family’s shelter; the thought of again being cramped together all night was as awful as was now using the basement. No, she would take her chances up here in her flat. If John came up asking what she was doing and if she was all right, she would not open the door to him, would call out that, thank you, she knew what she was doing and was all right and to go away.

  Four days later on the Saturday night she was to regret her decision. The raids were just as bad during those four days, the flat was shaken by one explosion after another, but nothing fell too close, thank God.

  She devised a safety measure of sorts with the legs of the bed raised on several bricks she’d brought up from the yard, the bedding arranged on the floor underneath the bed for her and Addie to sleep on. At least if the roof fell down, it would fall on the bedsprings and not on her and Addie. It could be that the whole building could be hit, but then it would make no odds if they were up here or buried in the basement by tons of rubble.

  She did leave the back door unlocked though, for easy access should they need to be rescued. Always better safe than sorry. It was taking a chance on John coming up to persuade her down into the cellar, but those times were gone forever.

  She hadn’t the courage to venture into his shop to tell him of her decision
, but left a note for him in the basement. The moment he found it he came hurrying upstairs to ask what was the matter.

  Though the kitchen door was unlocked, he tapped lightly on it that first night.

  ‘Brenda, darling, are you in there?’ His cultured voice was faintly panicky. ‘Darling, come to the door. I need to talk to you.’ And when she didn’t reply, continued, ‘I know how you feel, but I love you.’

  Now she replied. ‘John, go away. We can’t carry on that way.’

  ‘But you can’t stay up here.’ His mouth close to the door, he sounded as though he were in the flat. ‘You’re putting yourself and Adele in terrible danger. I promise, darling, I won’t go near you if that’s what you want, but you must come down.’

  But she knew she couldn’t trust him to keep that promise, nor would she be able to trust herself if he came near her. Already, hearing his voice, her insides had begun to flutter. Concentrating her whole mind on Harry’s letter, its dire contents, his words of love and the terrible loss of hope that seemed to penetrate every word, Brenda tightened every muscle in her body to stop their inane fluttering.

  ‘I can’t, John. Please go away.’

  ‘But you could be killed up here. It’s silly.’

  Maybe it was. Maybe she was putting herself and Harry’s daughter in needless danger. Perhaps he could come home to find them both dead. The basement was the only safe place. She almost succumbed. But surely it was worse if Harry came home to find that she’d been carrying on with another man all the time he’d been away. She felt suddenly ashamed. Her words burst from her as though she were speaking to a hated enemy.

  ‘Go away! It’s over, John. So go away – sod off!’