by Maggie Ford
Those who could afford it had left London. Another official evacuation of children started and Brenda was of a mind to let Addie go. She herself couldn’t with a business to run but she urged Vera to take the opportunity being offered to mothers and babies to go away, taking Addie with her. Mum urged her as well, but for all Vera’s fears it was like trying to move a block of concrete and by the time she agreed, it all came to an end. After two months with literally hundreds of the blighters coming over, their numbers had dwindled to just an odd few. Hitler’s secret weapon had been defeated by a great massing of ack-ack guns all along the south and east coasts. London had taken it yet again and had again triumphed. Brenda wrote to Harry of her relief and to say that so far they were all fine and safe.
The raids had left her feeling much stronger in mind. Prior to that she had never been able to bring herself to set foot in the basement for the memories it held for her. Maybe she had laid John’s ghost to rest by using it again, at long last able to face life without him though she would never forget him or the feelings he had aroused in her. But now she felt she could deal with them enough to turn her mind to other things – like taking a look at the house in Leytonstone, perhaps?
Chapter Twenty-five
In his room at the top of the Alvaro house where he was still billeted – his job these days was to repair trucks and lorries – Harry read Brenda’s latest letter that the attacks by doodlebugs were a lot less frequent than they had been.
She’d written several letters during the height of the attacks and he had feared for Addie. For Brenda too, of course. But she seemed to be doing pretty well, talking about her hairdressing business. She sounded quite independent these days, didn’t need his help. Reading, Harry would feel a sharp, almost hostile prickle of inadequacy. If he was home he’d put a stop to all that fancy lark of hers. She was his wife with him the breadwinner. But he wasn’t there to win the bread, and the feelings of hostility mounted.
She wrote about Vera and her twins, producing a sneer from him every time. Bloody fool taking things on like that, making a rod for her own back. Hadn’t got the brains she was born with. Well, when he got back home, he’d put her right and Vera would get her marching orders.
He knew it was distance that was making him feel so hostile. With Brenda so far away, any differences that would have been patched up in minutes if he were at home could not be mended from here. He did love her. He did fear for her. He did long for her. But after all these years away, sometimes she seemed a stranger. Probably he was a stranger to her for all her loving words. At one time her letters had lost some of their affection and he’d been worried. But now she was again full of all the lovey-doveys under the sun, and ironically it was that which was causing him some guilt.
‘He says Davy and Brian’ll be all right,’ said Brenda, reading part of Harry’s letter out loud to her mum and dad, who had come round to Sunday tea.
Her dad had at last come round to his younger daughter’s situation and after all her babies were his grandchildren.
‘Orright?’ he echoed sourly. ‘Them in the thick of the invasion and ’e thinks they’ll be all orright. Because ’e’s got through OK, don’t mean—’
‘He didn’t get through OK,’ interrupted Annie, looking hastily at her older daughter. ‘He got wounded in North Africa, remember?’
‘A scratch.’
‘It weren’t a scratch,’ exclaimed Brenda. Needled by his attitude, her carefully nurtured accents went instantly out of the window. ‘It put ’im in hospital fer ages. I thought they’d of sent ’im ’ome, but all they did was patch ’im up an’ send ’im back, but it weren’t no blooming scratch!’
‘All I’m tryin’ ter say is my boys could get wounded too,’ insisted David. ‘So ’ow can ’e say they’ll be orright? Just ’cos our blokes is forging ahead like a bloody ’ouse on fire, don’t mean none of ’em won’t get theirs.’
‘I don’t want ter think of that, thank you!’ cried Annie. ‘P’raps it don’t touch you like it do me, but yer could think of others’ feelings, sayin’ things like them gettin’ wounded or . . .’ She did not further that thought.
‘And there’s my Hank,’ said Vera, ‘out in Italy. Harry might be OK at the moment, out of the fighting, but Hank ain’t.’
‘We don’t want ter ’ear nothink about your ’Ank,’ her father cut in, banging his teacup down into its saucer. ‘’E ain’t yer ’usband and the least said of ’im the better.’
It was mid-August, the idyll of these last two months gone as Harry said goodbye to the Alvaro family, and it felt like his heart was breaking.
He was being called back into the fighting. Churchill had been to Italy on a visit to Allied Headquarters and on a wave of elation, the British Army was surging northward. Florence was their objective, to sweep the Germans out of the country as soon as possible their goal. And now he was being ordered to leave this little paradise that he had mistakenly imagined he could inhabit forever.
Luisa, in tears, was being comforted by her mother’s stout arms. The weeping girl stood far taller than her mother, and needed to bend to bury her head in the ample bosom.
‘You will come back,’ her mother was saying in Italian. Her words were translated by Maria, who spoke a little English, as did her sister, each often taking turns to explain what their parents said, though today it was beyond Luisa to do anything but cry.
Harry, having picked up a little of the language, lifted his shoulders despairingly in reply, and indeed felt genuine despair. In the weeks he’d been here, he and Luisa had grown close. Too close for someone who should have known he was only passing through. She was the sweetest, most gentle-natured, loving and most trusting girl he’d ever met, and he’d fallen in love with her. He had pushed away the guilt of knowing himself married. So many times he would think about it after they had made love, and it would tear at him knowing his infidelity would always have to be kept secret from Brenda.
It had come about almost without him realising it. He’d been attracted to Luisa from the start, both her and her sister. With their long, shiny, deep brown hair, their dark Italian eyes and the slim figure most young Italian girls seemed to possess, they had caught his eye, but it was Luisa to whom he had spoken the most, her command of English being more than Maria’s. She had told him about her family, her father who was a shoe repairer. Living on the outskirts of Rome the war had more or less passed them by until, with Italy changing sides, the Allies had come swooping up from the south to fight Germans and shatter the tranquillity they had known.
Harry listened to it all and felt more sympathy for a girl caught up in war than he needed to, and he had loved the way she spoke. One evening when they were alone he’d kissed her, on impulse because her lips had been so close to his and so tempting. She hadn’t drawn away and from then on it had been a matter of each wanting something more than just a kiss. Her parents, simple folk who did not see beyond their small world, smiled and nodded, happy to see their daughter courted by – and they had been very candid about it – such a handsome young soldier. Probably they, like him, thought it could go on forever. But the war still went on and he had to follow orders. The lovely days and nights together had come to an end too quickly.
He would see Luisa again; he could not bear thinking that this was final. He told her so. Her parents too, with gestures and Maria interpreting. He said with his eyes on the weeping Luisa, looking so frail in her grief, ‘I mean ter come back, no matter what, and that’s a promise.’
It must have sounded far more romantic in Maria’s Italian version, for as Luisa lifted her face from her mother’s bosom to gaze at him, her eyes glistened with hope through their tears so that he smiled tenderly at her, his whole heart revealed in that smile.
‘This ain’t really goodbye,’ he told her, and in halting Italian, added, ‘I love you, Luisa. When the war is over, I will return to you.’
In response she propelled herself away from her mother to throw herself into his arm
s, and he held her tight while her family looked on, Maria with envious eyes, the parents beaming approval. He had never told them he was married. Luisa didn’t know either. Maybe that had been underhanded but as he felt at this moment he really meant what he’d said. After the war, if at all possible, he would come back. There was a lump in his throat and Brenda seemed to be fading to a vague shadow, hardly discernible.
Two hours later, having joined his unit being transported north to the fighting around Florence, normality had taken over again. He would never come back. It wasn’t logical to think he would. Here was the real world. Brenda, waiting for him back home, was his real world. Two brief months of Luisa had been just dreaming. But into his heart came a strong conviction that back there he had already left something of himself with Luisa; that nine months from now there would be a little likeness of himself whimpering in the tender care of the Alvaro family, for Luisa, as the strong Catholic she was, had refused any unsanctioned protection.
Time and the speeding miles reawakened his common sense to override the pain of separation and told him as they drove northward that of course he would never go back, that it would be senseless to make enquiries and heap a load of trouble on himself. If Brenda ever found out . . .
With that thought, Brenda grew clear in his mind again. At this very moment waiting for him, keeping herself for him, how could he ever spring a thing like that on her? Best not to delve. Luisa with her loving family would be supported by them, surely. How many other young Italian girls were being left behind in this war to bear fatherless children? It wouldn’t stigmatise her. She would confess her sins to her priest, do a small penance and receive forgiveness, or whatever, and everyone would surely understand and be ready to help. Not like people at home who’d point a finger to every erring girl as they went by.
With this convincing if misguided argument, Harry was able to comfort himself. But he would never forget her, and he knew he’d always be left wondering at times that somewhere . . .
Quickly, Harry shut down the thought and turned to the future as the convoy sped onwards.
The invasion of Europe had uncovered many of Hitler’s secret weapon launchers, though not all, and the doodle-bug, if in sparser numbers, still drifted on through the summer. Most people, even Vera, had become inured to them, though they still killed.
Harry’s mother was more incensed by them than alarmed, and would chide her husband at his concern for his family’s safety. It served to irritate Brenda into defending the mild-mannered man when she went round there, especially when the chiding was directed at Daphne. Despite having turned into a capable mother to the two-year-old Robert, she was still unable to say boo to a goose where her mother-in-law was concerned and seemed quite willing to accept being walked all over by her.
‘Why don’t you stand up to her more?’ challenged Brenda after the senior Mrs Hutton had practically ordered Daphne to stop moping over Bob. ‘You let her boss you about like you was some kid instead of a mum.’
‘She don’t realise she’s doing it,’ was Daphne’s excuse. ‘Besides, I suppose I do mope after ’im. It’s that I get so worried with ’im over there. I don’t know ’ow you’ve stood it with Harry away all these years out there in Italy. Bob’s only bin away three months.’
Bob had gone over in the first wave of troops. But so had Davy and Brian, her own brothers, and she, Vera, Mum and Dad were all worried for their well-being. Daphne’s husband wasn’t the only one, and Brenda could quite see how Mrs Hutton would be short with Daphne at times.
‘We’ve all got someone over there,’ she reminded her. ‘There, or in Italy, or in the Far East. We just ’ave ter pray they keep safe.’ At which Daphne had given her a look as if she’d cast a spell on all their safety.
Early in September there came something else to worry about as, without a doodlebug anywhere near, came a low but tremendous explosion, more like a terrific blast wave, that rattled the windows of Brenda’s salon. Everyone, apart from the one with her hair securely strung up to the overhead perming machine, rushed with wet locks or hair partly in curlers or only partly cut to see what was going on. Seconds later, joined by scores of other spectators along Bow Road, they saw the cloud of smoke rising slowly over the rooftops to the south-west, low down and paled by distance.
‘I reckon that’s a factory gorn up somewhere,’ came a speculation.
‘Alan an’ ’Amburies in Bethnal Green, d’yer fink?’ Alan and Hanbury dealt in medical supplies. It had been hit during the last war.
‘More like somewhere round the docks?’
‘It looks a lot farver off than that.’
‘I bet it’s sabotage. I bet it’s Fifth Columnists.’
‘They don’t blow fings up. They just spread rumours an’ fings and take secrets back ter old Adolf!’
‘Them’s spies, not Fifth Columnists.’
‘Well, I don’t know, do I? But it was a blinking big explosion fer bein’ all that far away, don’t matter what yer say.’
It took all Brenda’s efforts to persuade them back inside which they did in a trickle, returning to their chairs for her and young Joan to get on with them while they treated the woman trapped by her heated perming curlers to their opinions on the distant smoke they’d seen. The woman’s face turned pale. ‘I hope nuffink’s ’appened to me ’ome.’
‘No – more like a factory of some sort gorn up near the docks.’
‘I did say it weren’t the docks,’ insisted the woman with only half her hair in curlers, the rest of which Brenda resumed putting in. ‘The docks is sarf of ’ere. That was west,’ she added assertively, wincing and drawing in a sharply overdone breath at a too-tight curler. Brenda hurriedly apologised.
‘Well, I don’t know.’ There came an easy-going giggle. ‘I can’t tell west from east, norf from sarf. All I know, somefink’s got blown up. Some sort of accident I expect.’
Later they were to learn the truth. Hitler’s second secret weapon, the V2. Packed with high explosives, launched fifty miles into the stratosphere to travel faster than sound so that the first intimation of it would be the detonation which many were never to hear at all.
‘I don’t think these rockets worry me as much as them doodlebugs did,’ announced Brenda to her mother when she arrived one morning while Brenda was eating her breakfast of jam on toast. ‘Them doodlebugs put the fear of God up you when you heard them coming, but not knowing these are coming ain’t half as . . .’ Hardly had the words left her lips than an unexpected if distant explosion rocked the flat, making her jump nigh out of her skin, and some of the tea she was sipping spilled into the butter dish with its two-ounce ration for the week.
Mum, unruffled, stared down at the dish now awash with tea. ‘I see – orright then – look what yer done ter yer bit of butter ration then,’ was all she said.
There was nothing one could do about V2s. No warning came either by siren or sound. You just had to get on with life, like it or lump it. Brenda, having plucked up her courage for a completely different reason, finally visited the house in Leytonstone one Sunday morning, leaving Addie with Vera and her two little cousins whom she loved dearly.
It took a while to find the street, then the house. When she finally did, she could only stand looking at it for what seemed ages. Terraced, it had a bay window on the ground floor and one upstairs, and a wide door with a stained-glass panel set back in a porch. There were heavy net curtains at the windows which she hadn’t expected to see in an empty house. There was no gate to the front garden; most iron gates had gone for the war effort long ago.
Each step required an effort of willpower as finally she made her way along the black-and-white tiled front garden path. The lawn beside it had long got out of hand, the seeded grass obscuring any plants there might have been but for a straggle of bush roses now inundated by suckers, while weeds grew high against the wooden boundary wall to the next door house.
Finding the key the solicitor had given her, she put it in the door and fee
ling like an interloper turned it, the door opening to her tentative push. She was met by the musty, closed-up smell of any place left vacant for any length of time. She stood uncertainly in the hallway, which looked far larger than she had imagined. At her feet lay a few bits of mail; no doubt they had not been picked up by the solicitor’s people who dealt with such things.
Feeling it wasn’t her place to inspect them, she stepped over them instead, making her way slowly, quietly, as though any heavier footfall might disturb someone, to the door of the front room. It stood slightly ajar giving her the impression that someone was indeed in the house. There was no one, though, all was still. Taking a deep breath she pushed the door further open.
The room was quite large, the ceiling high. But what struck home most was the sense that someone had only just left. The large three-piece suite in brown patterned moquette still showed indentations, almost as if John had only this minute got up from either a chair or the sofa. A shiver ran through her leaving in its wake an empty place in her breast. The brown and fawn curtains looked as if they had only a moment ago been pulled back. On a side table lay a cigarette box, a bulbous chrome table cigarette lighter, a book, a small lamp. The rug in front of the fire-place still bore imprints of shoes. There was a sideboard holding a couple of ornaments, some writing material, a small mound of letters and envelopes, and several books. Two bookshelves had several of their books leaning at an angle against others just as he’d left them, and Brenda had the sensation that at any minute he would enter the room or get up from an armchair to put them straight.
It was eerie. Everything remained as he had left it the day he’d gone off into the Merchant Navy. The house still bore the traces of him, yet all was silent now and untouched. Taking it all in triggered a most strange sensation deep inside her, knowing that the last person to see it had been him, as though his ghostly hand was reaching out to her, to touch her, to join her to him in this place. She almost fled. But taking deep breaths she managed to control her wildly vivid imagination. Others had been in here, hired by the solicitors to keep an eye on the place. It was just a house. Yet in all this silence she almost thought she could hear John breathing.
