A Soldier's Girl

by Maggie Ford

  The late John Stebbings . . . The implication was unbearable. There had to be a mistake.

  She became aware of Vera calling out to her from the back kitchen. Vera must have come down the outside stairs to find her. The thought came of its own accord even as she fought to make sense of what she had read. It came to her also that the voice was raised in panic. ‘Brenda! Oh, God, Brenda!’

  For a moment she had the impression that the voice was her own, then, ‘I think I’ve started! Bren, come quick!’

  As if propelled, Brenda started up, ran for the kitchen. It was a pure reflex action almost as if to escape that which was going through her head.

  She reached the kitchen, an automaton. ‘What’s the matter?’

  But she already knew what was the matter seeing Vera double over, clutching her stomach with one hand and holding on to the table edge with the other, her face screwed in agony.

  ‘You can’t ’ave, not yet,’ Brenda heard herself crying as she grabbed a chair and tried to push Vera down on to it. ‘You get nagging pains first – for ages.’

  ‘I ’ad them all day yesterday and on and off all through the night.’

  ‘Why didn’t you wake me? Why didn’t you say?’

  ‘I just thought I ’ad wind. We ’ad that tin of baked beans yesterday. I thought it was them.’

  Brenda’s mind was flying in several different directions at once. Get to the phone and call an ambulance. But what if Mum didn’t get here, what would she do with Addie? There were clients coming through the door any moment now, she’d have to tell them to go home. Could Joan cope? What a way to run a business. And all the time at the back of her mind was the contents of that solicitor’s letter, making her feel sick . . .

  ‘Stay where you are,’ she commanded as a fierce cry was ripped from Vera. ‘Try to relax. You’ll be orright. I’m going ter phone for an ambulance.’ Addie would just have to be dragged out of bed and go with them.

  The phone to her ear, Brenda felt faint, felt the floor wanted to come up and meet her, that it was wavering unsteadily under her feet, no longer solid. The words the late John Edward Stebbings were pounding in her brain. She mustn’t give way – mustn’t faint. A woman’s voice smote her eardrum and the floor instantly steadied, stopped moving about.

  ‘Can you send an ambulance to Brenda’s Place,’ she began, slowly and distinctly, again in charge of herself. ‘It’s the hairdresser’s in Mile End Road. For Vera Wilson – booked in at the London Hospital – she’s having her baby.’ She began to say the road number, but the woman stopped her with a cheery, ‘Yes, I know, I’ve had my hair done there before now. I’m—’

  But Brenda had no care for small talk. ‘Can you send an ambulance straight away? It’s urgent,’ she interrupted and the voice became efficient.

  ‘It’ll be with you within a short while. OK?’

  Brenda sat in Mr Duncan’s cramped little office above the premises of Lee Dairies in Leytonstone, the room made even more sombre by the scudding clouds and driving sleet outside.

  She had travelled here by bus, fighting the elements with an umbrella that threatened to turn inside out, water splashing up into her shoes, her raincoat and handbag streaked with wet for all the brolly’s protection.

  Now, with it draining off into the trough of the hatstand on which her damp mac hung, she sat tense and dry-eyed. The dull empty pain inside her ironically proved an effective barrier to tears as she listened to Mr Duncan telling her that his late client, John Stebbings, had made a will on entering the Merchant Navy last year to the effect that should he be killed – Brenda felt herself cringe from the cold sound of that phrase – his entire estate was to go to Mrs Brenda Hutton, named as his sole beneficiary being that he had no living relative.

  ‘So, Mrs Hutton,’ beamed the man, having read it out, appearing not to notice the pale, stiff features facing him, ‘as you see, there is no money involved, merely a few items of jewellery, not terribly valuable, and the house and its contents. At today’s prices the house itself will realise, being wartime and with few people interested in house-buying, I should say around seven hundred pound or so. It is quite a large house, Victorian, but in quite good order and you might find an interested buyer with an eye to the future after the war. As for the furniture, I don’t think it will fetch in any great sums. But if you wish to sell the house, I could act for you, of course.’

  No, she did not wish to sell. What to do with it she had no idea, but she didn’t wish to sell. And erase the last trace of him? No. All the while the solicitor was speaking the dull pain persisted, spreading through her body from some region around her heart; not a true pain, more a dark void, but as awful as any physical agony. How could she be sitting here discussing the disposal of the house which the man she had loved so much had left to her when her heart could only long to have him here again beside her?

  Her brain seemed incapable of thought, or rather it blocked thought as though not to would have had her bursting into tears, and that she was not going to do in front of this man with his cold, efficient smile. No emotion, no sympathy. She was a mere friend; it was in his expression as he beamed coldly (how a smile could be a beam and yet remain cold was one of the mysteries of his profession, she supposed) that the deceased could as easily have left it to some charity as to this woman, whoever she was. Apparently the documents had made no mention of any relationship she and John once had, and if this man suspected anything, he wasn’t letting on.

  There would be no one she could tell about the house and already it was beginning to weigh on her. She came away from the solicitor’s office feeling as though she had taken sleeping pills and was walking in a dream, the pavement seeming to be made of rubber. And all the while her heart was crying inside her for the man she would never again set eyes on. He had died at sea, sunk with his ship. Vanished completely. All she had left of him were her memories, and a large empty house!

  Six weeks now and still Brenda hadn’t been able to bring herself to go and see the house in Leytonstone. What state must it be in with no one there to tend it? Nothing would induce her to go and find out. The mere thought made it feel as though she’d be violating the love they had known, making it mercenary. It could stay as it was. People had grown accustomed to properties lying empty, but did they know the owner had died? Would they wonder if she presented herself there, letting herself in with the key that the solicitor had handed over? She didn’t want to have to explain herself to some inquisitive neighbour. But one day she would have to visit there.

  Anyway, for the moment her time was taken up by Vera’s babies. The birth had been hard and prolonged, being her first. It had been strange to see no man present when finally Brenda had been let into the ward to see her sister’s white and drained face looking up at her. She had said that Vera’s husband was away in Italy, fighting, and whether the nurses believed her or not she didn’t care. Poor Vera’s hollow eyes invoked Brenda’s pity; there was no husband and no man to comfort her and hold his children with pride.

  ‘He won’t desert me, will ’e?’ Vera had moaned at one time. Brenda reassured her with, ‘Of course he won’t. He’s stuck by you so far, ’asn’t he?’

  After a month, Brenda had begun to wonder what she’d let herself in for. The two boys took turns to cry and often cried together. They were utterly identical. Henry was named after his father in the hope that one day it would be changed to Hank, and the other one was called Samuel. Sam sounded very American, rather like Uncle Sam. Vera was insistent despite faces pulled by Brenda and Mum. With Vera not coping too well as yet, Brenda would regularly find herself at her wits’ end.

  Vera was constantly weepy, bucking up only when a letter from Hank arrived but in between full of doubt as to his loyalty. It took all Brenda’s resources trying to convince her that he’d never let her down. ‘Look what you read in his letters,’ she reminded her sister, ‘saying how proud he is and can’t wait to see his sons.’ But at times she could feel it all getting on top of
her, never mind Vera. And she had a business to run.

  The place was growing ever busier. Many women had become sufficiently inured to the war to give more time to themselves. Some, now long liberated from absent husbands, had started going out and about with like-minded friends and needed to look good. This went on despite heavy air raids having started up again since the last week of January after a virtual lull since the blitz at the beginning of the war.

  The Little Blitz, as it was being called, was still going on as February came and went. The duration of the raids was not as long as in the earlier Blitz and they were more irregular. But they were far more intensive and concentrated with larger bombs and more aircraft – on one occasion nearly three hundred reported – so that just as many homes were being devastated and people killed as in any raid during that first blitz. They went for other cities and regions too, Hull, Bristol, South Wales, though once more London was taking the brunt of it.

  Churchill was warning everyone that there could even be newer and more devastating forms of attack. He never said what, only that ‘Britain can take it!’ and that ‘the hour of our greatest effort and action is approaching’, and that the flashing eyes of their soldiers, sailors and airmen must be fixed on their front and the only homeward journey for all of them lay through the ‘Arch of Victory’.

  These remarks generated the certainty that the long-spoken-of Second Front would not be long in coming. Though exactly when, no one knew. Meantime they’d put up with continuing air raids and take it just as Churchill said. Taking it, the women continued to pop into Brenda’s Place to have their hair done so as to look nice – almost as a sort of defiance of Hitler. Consequently Brenda had her hands kept full.

  ‘Perhaps you’d help me,’ she suggested to Vera in an effort to get her sister out of her doldrums. But understandably Vera wasn’t too keen as yet to leave her four-week-old babies. She’d spend nearly all her time cuddling and crooning over them so long as they were good. When they weren’t, their crying would send her into fits of sobbing and seeking help, saying that she couldn’t cope with it all.

  Mum was a tower of strength. Despite the air raids which so far this time had left her still only half-restored home unscathed, she’d toddle round each morning, fair weather or foul, to give eye to them. ‘I’ve got nothink else much ter do,’ she would say. ‘Livin’ downstairs like we do, the place don’t take much lookin’ after, an’ yer Dad’s at work. I can be of more ’elp ’ere.’

  Addie of course was now at the local infants’ school, lapping up being with other children, and was no trouble to anyone, though Brenda died small deaths whenever the warning went if Addie was there at school.

  The babies were crying in the background and Vera held a hand to her forehead while Mum replaced soiled terry-towel nappies with fresh ones as Brenda stood opening a letter from Harry while she fought to ignore the chaos.

  His letters came slightly more regularly these days. This one was dated the first of June, to her relief saying that he hadn’t been so much in the fighting but repairing and driving supply trucks.

  ‘I’m getting to be quite a skilled mechanic,’ he wrote. ‘Maybe after the war I’ll make it me trade instead of going back to being a warehouseman.’

  This letter, like his others, was full of accounts of the Italian people, and the landscape too, maybe to give clues as to where exactly he was. But it was already being reported in detail. Now the Allies were forging ahead, Italy having last year declared war on Germany for all the Italians had let themselves be disarmed by the Germans.

  Harry’s letters from Sicily had hardly mentioned the place apart from a few words on Mount Etna and that it was a dry sort of island. He’d only been there for just over a month with Sicily falling quickly to the Allies. But of Italy Harry waxed poetic, about how easy-going the people were, how friendly they were, how he’d recently been made welcome by a family not far from Rome now that the area had been taken from the Germans.

  Their name’s Alvaro. They’re a really nice family. Very sociable. They keep wanting to feed me up. Said I’m too thin and they stuff me full of pasta and things. Funny stuff pasta. I ain’t all that keen on it but you’ve got to be sort of sociable. I was given leave so I’ve been to see them quite a bit. Mr Alvaro looks quite elderly really. Face all lined and creased. But he can’t be that old because he’s got two smashing daughters about twenty-something. Probably the heat and dry weather what does it. His wife’s short and plump and keeps reaching up and patting my face. The girls are called Maria and Luisa. She spelt that out for me so I know I got it right. They’re both of them smashing-looking. I’m being treated like a prince . . .

  Brenda ignored a small stab of jealousy the letter provoked, her laugh somewhat caustic as she thought, ‘I bet you are – with two smashing daughters at yer beck and call,’ and went to tell Vera, a little sharply, that changing nappies should really be her job, not Mum’s, before going down to open up the salon.

  For some reason as she put the letter aside, her times with John Stebbings flashed into her head carrying the usual twinge of sorrow. A vague thought came that if she could do what she had done, Harry could easily do the same with one of those daughters, but she quickly and angrily shrugged it away. If there was anything developing, Harry would be keeping it quiet, wouldn’t he?

  His next letter held no mention of them, nor did the one after. Brenda put it out of her mind as he wrote of the possibility of eventually being moved on further north with one after another Italian town being won from the Germans. Besides, there was much more to think about now. Exciting news for everyone, yet sobering lest it end up another Dunkirk. Though this time no one really thought so.

  It was on everyone’s lips – the invasion of Europe. D-Day. For the last fortnight every ear had been trained on Home Service news bulletins with maybe the only bit of light comedy allowed to intervene being ITMA. Never had so many newspapers been sold; every face was buried in one, in the street, in offices, in factories and shops during break times, in the home, as every foot of progress by the Allies got devoured.

  Like following the football results, Brenda thought as she read as avidly as anyone, with a touch of guilt at her own flippancy, because men didn’t die in football matches. Even so, people’s hearts needed lifting; for all the good news that was coming out of Europe and the Far East too there was still much to be faced at home.

  It was only three weeks ago that Brenda and Vera had thrown open the window to an unusual sound like that of an aeroplane in trouble and gazed up at the night sky. In Bow Road a murmur of wonder had risen as dozens of others stood also gazing upwards at what appeared to be an enemy bomber on fire. As the engine cut out and the plane fell out of the sky to crash not far away with a gigantic explosion that lit up the horizon, a cheer went up, forgetting those on whom the stricken plane must have landed. Minutes later another plane appeared with fire belching from its rear end, spluttering loudly before cutting out to topple earthward with another mighty explosion. This time the cheering from below was slightly laced with bewilderment. Even Brenda turned in wonderment to her sister.

  ‘Fancy shooting ’em down as easy as that. Funny though, I didn’t hear any gunfire, did you? There ain’t been any sirens either.’

  With a third plane, again with its rear end on fire and its engine growling like some badly maintained motorbike to splutter into silence with only the sigh of the air over the wings, and again followed by an explosion, this time nearer, there was no cheering.

  Brenda’s own words echoed what others must have been thinking as she again turned to Vera with a shudder. ‘Something very odd’s going on. I don’t like it.’ Nor did Vera, her eyes wide with the same nameless uncertainty.

  They were to find out a few days later that what they’d witnessed was one of the ‘new forms of attack’ to which Churchill had referred. Three days later a general alert sounded across London and the Home Counties. It lasted all night, everyone flocking back into air raid shelter
s as an endless onslaught of what was now termed the V1 growled low overhead to fall randomly on running out of fuel. After that they came by day and night.

  Pilotless planes or the flying bomb the Government called them. ‘Buzz-bombs’ and ‘doodlebugs’ they were dubbed by an irreverent public.

  But for all the sneers the now familiar ragged and ominous growl sent chills up the spine as listeners waited, tense, ready to duck as soon as the engine failed. Bated breath would be expelled if it continued on its noisy path. If it didn’t then all eyes would be trained on the direction it took, each trying to calculate where it would fall. With the tall plume of smoke rising from an explosion a short way off, the response was a sigh of relief that this time it wasn’t here. It was when it cut out directly overhead that people threw themselves to the ground.

  ‘It’s like one of them plague things,’ Vera said fearfully. ‘Yer can’t even see ’em when it’s cloudy, but they’re there, and one could drop on us any time and we wouldn’t know it.’

  Oh, we might, thought Brenda but best not to frighten Vera any further. Her fear was more for her little ones than herself.

  Brenda, too, thought of her child. Now Addie was at school, she prayed that no buzz-bomb would ever fall on that building. At night she could protect her, or at least felt that if they went, they would go together, so that neither one would be left to mourn.

  She had reinstalled beds down in the cellar, made it into a little home from home for her, Addie, Vera and the little twins. Being down there often brought back a poignant memory. Sometimes she would look up from her pillow as one doodlebug after another growled overhead, and half expect to see John Stebbings ducking his head under the lintel over the stairs, one slim arm hanging on to it for balance, to ask if she was OK.

  The memory always brought a hollow ache to her heart, but only momentarily as yet another grating roar passing overhead forced her mind back to the present. A direct hit could devastate even a basement, taking its occupants with it. But it was when Addie was at school that she suffered most. What if one day . . . and Harry away fighting, having to be told? God, it was an awful thought! What awful times they lived in!