Molly's War

by Maggie Hope

  They sang songs from the old war and ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ from this one and then there was a knock at the door and their neighbour walked in to complain that her man was on first shift and could they have some quiet, please? Then she got him out of bed to come and join the party when she saw Frank in a wheel chair, the hated long carriage pushed into a corner of the room, abandoned.

  Jackson and Molly didn’t have another minute to themselves. She was called from making sandwiches to sing ‘When I Grow Too Old to Dream’, and the applause brought the neighbours in from the other side, and so the party went on until the air raid warden came to complain that the back door was opening so often it was almost like a light flashing and were they trying to signal to the Germans? Frank said there wasn’t a cloud in the sky when he came in and not a German either but the party broke up then and Molly went to bed for a couple of hours until it was time for her to catch the bus into Bishop station and another day’s work.

  Before she went she slipped into the bedroom to whisper cheerio to the men. Jackson got out of bed and went downstairs with her. He pulled her into his arms and kissed her. ‘Watch yourself, kid,’ he said. ‘Don’t get into any sort of trouble ’til I come back. And I promise you, I will be back. We’ll be married, you’ll see.’

  Mona was at the gate calling softly to her and reluctantly Molly went out.

  ‘I love you, Jackson Morley,’ she said softly as she went.

  ‘Me an’ all,’ he replied. ‘I mean it.’

  The girls were quiet as they hurried down the road for the bus, both of them deep in their own thoughts. Mona had lost her sparkle, there were no jokes on the bus, none on the train.

  ‘War is hell,’ was her only comment as they separated to go to their work stations. ‘Who would have thought it, eh? Me mooning over a fella I’ve only known a week.’

  ‘We’re beginning to look like Chinese,’ said Mona, gazing critically into the mirror on the wall of the changing room.

  ‘We’re all turning a bit yellow, it’s true,’ said Molly. ‘They say they’re going to supply a special cream to stop the powder affecting the skin. It’ll form a sort of barrier.’

  ‘I can’t see it meself,’ said Mona gloomily. ‘The powder might just mix with it and soak in all the more. Harry won’t know me when he comes back.’ She still hadn’t returned to her usual bouncy self, Molly thought. Mona’s brows were usually knitted nowadays; her smile wasn’t to be seen so often as it once had been. She was worried about Harry, Molly supposed, but then she was herself. Most of the girls were worried about the brothers and sweethearts who were in France.

  No, Belgium they were now, if the wireless was to be believed. The British Expeditionary Force was in Belgium anyway and the DLI were part of it, weren’t they? She looked up at the poster on the wall:

  KEEP IT DARK,

  FOR THE DURATION!

  And the other one alongside it:

  WALLS HAVE EARS!

  There was a picture of a brick wall with an ear growing grotesquely out of the bricks.

  Everyone talked about fifth columnists or spies. Maggie had been saying only last night that she had heard it as gospel in the doctor’s waiting room where she had gone to collect Frank’s tablets, for his slow recovery wasn’t all a bed of roses, she told anyone who would listen.

  ‘No, he has terrible pain and you would think in this day and age they could give him something strong enough to help him sleep through the night at least,’ she had remarked to Molly. Anyway, she’ d heard that Hitler had sent hundreds of spies with the refugees who had come from Germany and all over. No, she had nothing against the poor souls, they’d lost their homes and some had lost their families, but it made you wonder, didn’t it? Molly was brought back to the present by Mona.

  ‘If you don’t get a move on you’ll miss the train,’ she said as she went out of the door. Mona herself was going on the bus to Ferryhill. She had no reason now to go back to Eden Hope to see her auntie, not when Harry wasn’t there.

  ‘Righto,’ Molly replied. ‘See you tomorrow.’ She went out and set off for the gate, not noticing that someone was walking by her side until he spoke.

  ‘Molly?’ he said and she looked up in surprise, seeing it was the foreman on the band, a man in his thirties, she supposed, no taller than she was herself and podgy with it. He was sometimes sharp with some of the girls but had always been civil to her, smiling when he asked her to do something and adding, ‘If you don’t mind, Molly?’

  ‘Oh, hello, Mr Dowson,’ she said, wondering what he wanted with her. The next minute she found out.

  ‘I was thinking, Molly, how about going to the pictures, on Saturday? We could go to the Hippodrome in Shildon, or if you like we could go to …’ He stopped speaking as he saw that she was shaking her head. His eager smile slipped a little.

  Molly was taken aback. For a minute she couldn’t think of an answer, simply shook her head.

  ‘We can go somewhere else, if you’d prefer,’ he said, recovering. ‘How about a dance? There’s one on at –’

  She stopped walking. ‘No, I’m sorry, Mr Dowson, I can’t. I’m engaged to a soldier, didn’t you know? I have to catch my train now.’

  She set off at a smart pace, leaving him standing frowning after her.

  Mona needn’t have worried. The train to Bishop Auckland was held up on a branch line. There was a munitions train standing by the platform of the tiny station and it was still being loaded. By the time the workers’ train actually got moving it was thirty minutes late and the tired passengers were low and dispirited.

  Molly found a seat in a corner and stared out of the window at the dark shapes as they rushed by. The train was unlit although once they were through Shildon tunnel and away from the munitions factory a tiny blue light came on, giving an eerie glow.

  Snow had begun to fall earlier in the afternoon, a desultory sort of fall, starting and stopping and not lying except in small patches near the side of the line. But now it suddenly thickened until the windows of the compartment were blotted out with white.

  ‘Oh, heck, I hope the buses aren’t stopped before we get home,’ someone moaned. ‘It can snow as much as it likes tomorrow, maybe we won’t get to work in the morning and can have a day off. But not tonight, please, I have a date the night.’

  When the train arrived in Bishop Auckland it was a slipping, sliding struggle to get down to the bus stop. The bus was crowded, the conductor shouting to the queue, ‘Workers only, please, workers only!’ Somehow Molly managed to squeeze on and it lurched off on its way round the mining villages to the east of the town.

  ‘Sorry, folks, we’re going no further tonight!’ the driver called, sounding quite cheerful as he climbed the steps into the bus. ‘I’m not going to chance it any road.’

  There was a chorus of groans from the passengers who only a minute before had been congratulating themselves that no one had been hurt when the bus had skidded and slithered to a sudden stop in a snow bank at the side of the road. At least there’d been no standing passengers by this time, the bus was only a few stops from its terminus.

  Those left sat and looked at one another until the driver, sounding impatient, went on, ‘Let’s be having you, you’ll have to walk the rest of the way. Come on, it cannot be far. Got your flashlights, have you? Well then, you’ll be fine. Worse things happening to our lads, you know!’

  Molly got to her feet, thankful that she had invested in a pair of rubber over-shoes to go over her shoes only last Saturday. Outside the snow was driving down, freezing cold. It stung her face and drove under her collar, flung open the bottom of her coat, needled her knees.

  She set off up the dark hill, one of a crowd which gradually grew thinner as people came to their homes. Eden Hope was the last village in the string. Down into the valley she trudged, where there was at least some relief from the biting wind, up the other side and at last in to Eden Hope, past the colliery to the end of the rows.

  ‘Eeh, come on in, la
ss,’ said Maggie when at last Molly reached the house and pushed her way through the drift of snow which the wind had blown against the back door. It came over her rubber over-shoes, and soaked wet and cold through her already wet stockings. ‘A rotten night. Eeh, did you have to walk? You look like Nanouk of the North!’

  ‘We had to walk the last bit, the bus was stuck.’

  There was a letter propped on the mantelpiece, Molly saw with a sudden lift of her spirits. The warmth of the blazing fire filled the kitchen together with the smell of liver and onions cooking in the oven. She took off coat and scarf, both encrusted with snow, sat and undid her shoes and only then did she walk over to the fire, to see that it was Harry’s handwriting.

  Not that she was disappointed, she told herself. Only last year she would have given anything to hear from her brother. But it wasn’t from Jackson.

  ‘Oh, aye, a letter from your brother,’ remarked Maggie as she opened the oven door and took out the steaming dish of liver and onions. ‘We haven’t heard from Jackson either,’ she added as she read Molly’s expression. ‘There’ll be a reason, pet. But mebbe Harry has some news of him.’

  ‘Nothing much,’ said Molly as she tore the envelope open and scanned the single sheet. ‘Most of it’s been crossed out by the censor. He says the two of them have become attached to something, but what that something is has been blotted out. And he says they’re both in the pink. Jackson is a sergeant again. He says …’ She looked up to see both Maggie and Frank watching and listening eagerly.

  ‘I knew he’d get his stripe back,’ said Frank. ‘Can’t keep a good soldier down, can they?’

  ‘Here,’ said Molly, handing over the letter. ‘You read it, if you like.’ She attacked her meal, feeling the heat of the fire seeping through to her chilled bones, her feet aching as the circulation returned to normal.

  At least there had been a letter from one of them and both were fine when it was written, she thought. That was a bit of a relief. Finishing her meal, she got up to clear the table and wash up, which had become the accepted routine since she came to live at the Morleys’. Maggie did the cooking, Molly the washing up.

  Afterwards she sat with them round the fire, listening to the wireless, Maggie knitting a pullover and Molly darning the elbows of one. At nine o’clock there was the BBC News. Both women’s hands stilled as they listened.

  There was fighting in Belgium, near the border with France, the news reader announced. Was that where Jackson and Harry were? Molly stared into the fire, her mending forgotten.

  Maggie rose to her feet afterwards, lifted the kettle to see if there was enough water in it for the cocoa and settled it on the fire. She went to the window and lifted a corner of the blackout curtain, peering out.

  ‘It’s stopped snowing any road,’ she remarked. ‘I reckon you’ll be able to get to work the morn, Molly.’ She made the cocoa, put a careful spoonful of sugar in each cup and handed it round.

  ‘In the Co-op today I heard that women with more money than sense were coming round from the towns and asking to buy folk’s sugar ration.’

  ‘No one sold, did they?’ Molly looked up from her cocoa. Sugar rationing had begun just after Christmas, other foodstuffs in January.

  ‘Well, one woman was going to, but they soon put her right according to Mrs Wright. You know, her from the top row. Sent the lah-di-dah one off with a flea in her ear an’ all.’ Maggie grinned at the thought. The men were all working now, women had a bit of money in their purses, no need to give up their precious sugar to the better off, nor anything else, neither. Why, she remembered a time just before the war when a woman had come to the village and bought up the whole stock of sugar in the shops, filling a car with the stuff. The miners’ wives had been up in arms over that.

  ‘In a motor car an’ all, she were, Mrs Wright said.’ Maggie reverted to the present. ‘How did she get the petrol, that’s what I’d like to know?’

  Molly drained her cup. ‘I’ll just wash these up then I’ll be off to bed,’ she said. ‘At least I’m on second shift, the roads will likely be cleared by then.’ She smiled at the older couple, feeling a surge of affection for them. With all their troubles they had taken her in, treated her as one of the family. She would always be grateful to them for that. She touched the ring on her finger with the other hand, looked down at the stones glinting in the gaslight. When this war was over … Her eyes were alight with dreams.

  Next morning, as Maggie had predicted, the roads were fairly clear. The bus grunted and groaned its way into the town then Molly easily caught the train to work. The snow covering fields beside the line shone in the pale sunshine, the cleared track snaking out before the train.

  Even the sprawling mass of the factory buildings looked clean and attractive under the snow. It was so big now that there was a bus to the Administration building at the far end. Eight square miles, Mona said it was, though how she knew Molly hadn’t an idea.

  ‘Hello, Molly,’ a man’s voice said as she came out of the clean room, once again swathed in an overall, her hair tied up under a turban.

  ‘Hello, Mr Dowson,’ she replied and quickened her pace. As she turned to go into the room where she was working, she glanced back. He was still standing where she had left him, gazing after her. He smiled and gave a little wave. Molly wished he wouldn’t, he made her feel so uncomfortable.

  ‘I think he’s smitten with you,’ one of the girls walking past in a group said, and they all burst into giggles.

  ‘Don’t talk so daft,’ said Molly. Even if he was, she thought as she started work, she’d told him last night she was engaged, hadn’t she? She dismissed him from her thoughts, humming along with the Andrews Sisters on the wireless. Today was a good day, she told herself. Today there would be a letter from Jackson sitting on the mantelpiece when she got home. It was lovely, getting a letter from him, almost as good as actually seeing him. Almost but not quite.

  Chapter Eighteen

  REFUGEES STREAMED ALONG the country road. Jackson watched one grandmother with a baby in her arms, the mother pushing a baby carriage filled with clothes and household goods wrapped up in bedding and dragging a toddler with the other hand.

  ‘Hell’s bells, I wish they would get off the road,’ said Harry feelingly. ‘It’s bad enough trying to get the lads moved along without fighting your way through this lot.’

  Next minute the whole column were fleeing for the ditch at the side as a twin-engined ME110 German fighter plane swooped out of nowhere and began strafing them. Harry grabbed the old woman and screaming baby and dived with her for safety, Jackson close behind with the mother and little boy. They huddled together in the scant cover and after what seemed an age and another couple of runs by the plane, the pilot tired, or perhaps his fuel was running low, and turned to go back where he came from. The sound of the engine died away in the distance. It was very quiet except for a baby crying and someone moaning a few yards away.

  ‘Come on, we can’t help them.’ Before the refugees could gather themselves together Jackson was back on the road, shouting for the men of his patrol. ‘Fall in! Come on, lads, we have to make the river by nightfall.’

  They had been seconded to a French Army unit which was defending a small hamlet on the River Dyle. The roads were choked with refugees. The only way through was on foot. Why they were going to aid the French neither Jackson nor Harry knew, but they had had their orders and were determined to carry them out. Even more determined now even though they had to pass by a group of crying children clustered round a woman lying on the ground, wounded if not dead. Surely others among the refugees would help?

  Setting off at a quick march the soldiers of the DLI moved down the road, at times detouring into the fields beside it to overtake a group of refugees. They were silent mostly, grim-faced after what they had just witnessed.

  ‘I keep thinking, Jackson,’ Harry said after the first mile, ‘if that lot should get to England it could be our Molly on the run with your parents. My G
od! They could be being strafed by …’

  ‘Neither Hitler nor the Luftwaffe nor his bloody army is going to get to England,’ snapped Jackson roughly. ‘I don’t want to hear that sort of talk.’

  Harry glanced quickly at his set face and away again. He was right, it couldn’t happen. It didn’t bear thinking about.

  They reached the French position by seven o’clock. It was a warm May evening, the sun casting long shadows on the fields surrounding the cluster of houses. The French soldiers welcomed them quietly, gave them bread and slices of Belgian sausage, spicy, with lumps of fat in it, and completely alien to the lads from Durham.

  ‘I’ll be up half the night with this lot,’ one of them grumbled though he went on ploughing his way through it, washing it down with rough red wine. ‘What I wouldn’t give for a bit of meat pudding and a glass of Newcastle Brown!’

  ‘Get away, man,’ said Harry. ‘This is nothing to what we had to eat in India. The food there was hot enough to take the roof off your mouth. Why –’

  What he had been going to say none of them discovered because at that precise moment three German dive-bombers, the noise of their engines muffled at first by the hill which they came over, zoomed down on the hamlet and strafed everything in sight. There was only the one run and after it Jackson picked himself up from under the bush where he had dived and looked around to assess the damage.

  A few yards away a French ack-ack gun had opened up from its cover behind a clump of bushes. Now the gun barrel was lifted to the sky, waiting for the return run which never came.

  ‘Harry!’

  Jackson ran to his friend who sat slumped against the trunk of a tree, a lump of French bread still in his hand, his mouth hanging open slackly. Even as Jackson got to him, a dark red stain showed through the rough khaki of his battledress, spreading, turning almost black, beginning to drip on to the bare earth under the tree.