Molly's War

by Maggie Hope

  ‘I will. I’ll go into a home, I’m telling you, then I’m not beholden to anyone. I’ll see the doctor tonight, ask if he’ll arrange it.’

  ‘Oh, Molly, don’t! Please don’t,’ said Dora. She sat down heavily, looking stricken. But Molly was determined, though when she saw the effect on Dora she felt a pang of compunction. But she had been uneasy for a while about the way the other woman was taking over. Sometimes you could swear the baby was hers or at least that she was the grandmother. It would be best to get away for a while. And in the home there would be other girls like Molly.

  ‘Look, Dora, it’ll be for the best,’ she said. ‘I’m not saying I won’t come back to see you, I will.’

  ‘You won’t,’ Dora sniffed.

  Molly sighed. ‘Well, I’m away to the doctor’s now, the surgery starts at five and I’ll get a good turn.’ Dora said no more and Molly put on her coat and went out in silence.

  It was a beautiful day when she walked up the drive to the home. Dora had offered to take the day off and go with her but Molly had refused. At least Dora had accepted her decision to have the baby there, thought Molly. She had apologised for losing her temper and Dora had accepted gracefully. Only too pleased to, Molly realised. In the back of her mind she suspected Dora wanted the baby as a substitute for Mona, but what could she do?

  She winced as the gravel from the path pressed through the thin leather of her shoes. Her feet were already slightly swollen and aching. The path undulated between what had once been lawns and were now potato patches. DIG FOR VICTORY said a poster seen everywhere, and most people obeyed. So instead of grass and roses there were yellow potato flowers, promising a good harvest of King Edwards in the autumn.

  The baby in her belly moved and kicked. Molly winced, her bottom rib sore. This child would be a footballer, she thought wryly as the large redbrick house came into view. She rang the bell and waited. After a few minutes a tiny girl in an all-enveloping overall, like the one Molly herself had worn at the factory, opened the door and peered at her through thick-lensed spectacles.

  ‘Aw,’ she said, opening the door wider. ‘You’re the new lass. Howay in then.’

  Molly followed her into the hall of the big house. The great curving staircase with the large window at the first bend testified to the former magnificence of the place, but now it was bare with the floorboards scrubbed and a great, empty stone fireplace. A damp cold struck Molly in contrast to the warmth of the summer’s day outside.

  ‘I’ll tell Matron you’re here,’ said the girl, and scuttled to a door at the side where she knocked.

  ‘Enter!’ a voice boomed out, and something about that imperious command made Molly’s heart plummet in despair. For some reason it reminded her of prison. She put a protective arm around her stomach though she hardly knew why she did it. Standing waiting in the hall, she told herself it was just something else to be got through. ‘What can’t be cured must be endured’ sprang to her mind, a cliche often repeated in Eden Hope.

  Molly was to repeat it to herself often before her baby was born. When she was on her knees scrubbing down the great staircase with her belly sometimes rubbing against the treads. Or mangling sheets in the ancient laundry where washing machines hadn’t been heard of, or if they had were not considered necessary in this place. After all there was the free labour of the pregnant women or new mothers.

  Vi, the girl who had answered the door to Molly on her first day, was a new mother though she hardly looked big enough to have carried a baby, let alone delivered one. In fact, she hadn’t. Not a live baby that is.

  ‘My baby was born dead,’ she confided in Molly as they rubbed the banister with vinegar water before polishing it. Her little face was screwed up and her eyes invisible behind the thick lenses of her glasses.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Molly said, pausing in her brisk rubbing of the mahogany rail, knowing her response was inadequate.

  ‘Aw, I’m over it now, it was two months ago,’ said Vi. ‘But I was that pleased when Matron said I could stay on. I haven’t got no mam or dad, like.’

  ‘Me neither,’ said Molly, feeling an instant kinship with this diminutive girl. ‘How old are you, Vi?’

  ‘Fifteen, I think.’

  ‘What did your boyfriend say when you started the baby, Vi?’

  She looked at Molly with transparent innocence. ‘Eeh, I haven’t got a boyfriend,’ she said, and giggled. ‘That’s what Matron asked me but I told her the same as I’m telling you – I never did have a boyfriend, the lads don’t look at me.’

  Yet somebody, some man, had taken the girl down, thought Molly, and when she was just a kid. She herself felt only a weary resignation at the ways of the world.

  ‘Well, me and you can adopt each other as sisters, what do you say? We can be family.’

  Molly didn’t know why she said it, she had enough problems of her own without taking on Vi’s, hadn’t she? But somehow the girl’s simple tale had pierced the protective shell she’d adopted since the telegram came.

  The regime at the home was hard and unremitting but Molly welcomed it. They were wakened at six o’clock every morning except Sunday when they were allowed to lie in until seven. Before breakfast they all had their allotted tasks; those not actually in labour or lying-in, that is. For Molly and Vi it was to the laundry where the bloody sheets and cloths from the labour ward which had been soaked overnight had to be put through the mangles, a task Molly found more and more exhausting. Vi, for all her small size, was surprisingly strong and turned the mangle with a will but Molly couldn’t let her do it all herself.

  At eight o’clock the gong went for breakfast and the girls, looking like maids from a bygone age in their overalls, with faces scrubbed clean and hair tied back ‘like little orphan Annie’ as one described it bitterly, went in to their porridge and fried bread. On Sundays they had their ration of one slice of bacon and a small pile of scrambled egg, which was really dried egg reconstituted.

  The rest of the day was filled with housework, with a free hour in the grounds after tea, rain or shine. The obstetrician on call to the home believed in fresh air. Some of the girls grumbled but Molly was glad of it. She and Vi would stroll around, inspect the progress of the potato patches, go round to the back to the kitchen gardens where the girls who had already had their babies and were over their lying-in period looked after the carrots and cabbages, peas and sprouts growing there.

  It was nice in the gardens. There were high walls that reflected the evening sun and blocked out the chill winds.

  ‘You’ll be working here soon, Molly,’ Vi said to her wistfully. It was a day in July and pods of green beans were swelling on the thick stems.

  ‘No, I’m going as soon as I’m allowed out,’ said Molly absently. She was watching a late bee busy in a clump of hollyhocks that had escaped being dug up in favour of vegetables. She wandered on up the path, at first not noticing that Vi hadn’t followed.

  ‘We’d better go in now,’ she said as she reached the end of the path. ‘Vi?’ For she hadn’t answered and when Molly turned round she saw the girl standing by the hollyhock clump, her shoulders hunched. She was crying.

  ‘Why, what’s the matter?’ Molly asked, and went back to her.

  ‘I thought you would be here another three months like the rest of them,’ Vi replied, between sobs, hiccuping a little. ‘What will I do when you’ve gone? You’ll forget about me.’

  ‘No, I won’t, Vi, I promise I won’t,’ Molly tried to assure her, but the girl nodded her head.

  ‘You will,’ she asserted. ‘Everyone does.’

  ‘Well, I won’t,’ said Molly. She put an arm around the other girl’s thin shoulders. ‘You’re the only sister I’ve got, aren’t you? Didn’t we adopt each other? I won’t forget you. You can come and see me on your afternoon off. Come on now, pet, dry your eyes and blow your nose and we’ll go in. We have to look after each other now.’

  Looking only partly reassured, Vi did as she was told. Goodness knows,
thought Molly, the lass has had few reasons to trust anyone so far. She would never let Vi down, she vowed silently, never.

  That same night Molly woke with a deep, nagging ache in her back. She lay for a few minutes, unsure what to do. The baby wasn’t due for another week. Perhaps this was another case of that false labour the other girls talked about frequently. But the ache deepened into a pain that made her gasp and at the same time she felt a gush of wetness between her thighs.

  There was a bell at the head of the bed, there for just this sort of emergency, and Molly struggled to reach it. The pain was holding her in a tight clamp and at first she couldn’t move. But reach it she did in the end and the bell rang out, loud and clear, so that the other girls in the ward, which was converted from the upstairs drawing room of the old house, stirred, a few lights went on and they came to crowd round the bed to see what was wrong.

  ‘Get out of the way this minute, girls!’ an authoritative voice snapped from the door and the crowd backed away to let the midwife on duty through. A capable woman, she was middle-aged with iron grey hair under a starched white cap and a bosom like a platform under her apron.

  ‘Now, what’s all the fuss about?’ she said to Molly. ‘Turn on your back and let me have a look at you.’

  ‘Right, it’s the labour ward for you,’ she said after she had examined Molly. ‘Though I’ve no doubt it will be hours yet before we see junior.’

  In fact it was not the next morning when Molly made her final, desperate push but the morning after. And when the baby girl did arrive, crying with rage no doubt at the delay, Molly was a quivering wreck and all she felt was an enormous thankfulness that at last her ordeal was over. Half an hour later, when the child was washed and put into her arms, ‘Only for a minute mind,’ the midwife admonished, Molly looked down at the red face of her daughter and fell instantly in love.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  ‘BUT WHY DID she leave Eden Hope, Mam? I mean what possible reason could she have had?’

  Maggie Morley gazed at her son, biting her lip. She couldn’t voice her suspicions of Molly, not to Jackson, not when he was so obviously worried about her. She was aware that he had trusted her to do her best for his girl this time and she had failed him. And Molly too. She and Frank had shut her out from their private grief, not admitting she might have been hurting as well. What’s more, Maggie was only too aware this wasn’t the first time she hadn’t spared enough thought for the lass. And it was only a suspicion she’d had that Molly had fallen wrong. Maybe she had been wrong. In fact, surely she would have heard by now if she’d been right? That spiteful cat Joan Pendle would have seen to it.

  ‘She said she wanted to be nearer the factory so she could save money on fares. Time an’ all. It wouldn’t take so long to get there, especially when she was on nights.’ Even as Maggie said it she turned away. He’d know they were only excuses.

  Jackson shook his head in disbelief, automatically putting a hand up when the movement caused him a spasm of pain.

  ‘Don’t, lad, be careful,’ his mother warned, forgetting about Molly. She put a hand out to him then took it back as he turned away and pulled a chair out from under the table.

  ‘I’m all right, Mam,’ he said, and sat down. Putting an elbow on the table, he leaned his aching head on his hand, using it as a prop.

  ‘Eeh, you’re not right yet, are you, son?’ asked his mother, her face creasing in anxiety.

  ‘I tell you, I am. I’m just upset about Molly.’

  No, she definitely couldn’t say anything to him yet, Maggie decided. If at all. Maybe she had been wrong about Molly, maybe she hadn’t been expecting after all. Maggie sighed. She had had enough on her hands when Jackson was missing all that time. Oh, she never wanted to go through that again. No, indeed. And worrying about the way Frank had taken it. She had hardly been able to look at the lass, never mind take an interest in her. Molly had reminded her too much of Jackson, her lovely lad.

  Then, when she had had the good news, she had told Joan Pendle to tell Molly and to give her the letter Jackson had sent. Well, Joan saw her at work, didn’t she? Surely the girl would have done it? She wasn’t as spiteful as all that, was she?

  If in the back of her mind Maggie had wondered why Molly hadn’t come straight back to Eden Hope to wait for Jackson, she hadn’t had time to do much about it, she had been so busy turning the house out, getting ready for his return. She’d even saved the precious fat and meat rations so that she could make him a real old-fashioned steak and kidney pie. And now he wasn’t eating it. It lay ignored on the table while he went on about Molly Mason. Maggie felt a niggle of jealousy. It was enough to make a saint swear, it really was.

  Jackson had picked up his letters to Molly, two of them, both unopened. ‘If I had her address, I’d go through. But I only have a few days, I have to report to the hospital on Monday.’

  Maggie felt a pang of disappointment and dismay. Monday! And it was already Thursday evening. And if he was going to spend the little time he had chasing after the lass, what time did that leave for his mother and father?

  ‘You’re not going to rush off straight away, lad, surely not?’ she protested.

  ‘No, of course I’m not,’ he said quickly, noticing the hurt expression his mother wore. ‘But I’ll have to try tomorrow. I’ll go to the factory, I think. After all, the weekend is coming up and she won’t be there then.’

  He couldn’t understand why Molly had gone off without even leaving her address. Of course, she hadn’t known he had survived and got back from France. But still, Harry might have been coming home on leave and she wouldn’t have wanted to miss him. Though perhaps she had written to her brother? Goodness knows, he thought unhappily. Harry was off somewhere on a ‘hush-hush’ operation he had been told, when his friend didn’t come back to see him at the hospital. There was no way he could get in touch with Harry just at the present. Poor Molly, she must think that she had no one at all. What good were he and Harry to her, always away at war?

  ‘Howay, lad, eat up the pie. Your mother made it especially for you,’ said Frank. He wheeled his chair up to the table next to his son. ‘Don’t blame her, lad,’ he said in a soft undertone. ‘She was at her wit’s end about you, she was.’

  Jackson smiled at him, tried to throw off his melancholy mood. ‘No, Dad, I’m not blaming her,’ he replied and looked across at his mother. He smiled at her and suddenly his face lit up, eyes crinkling at the corners, twinkling at her. And Maggie saw she had her lad back again and felt again the joy she had known when the news of his miraculous return from the dead reached her.

  ‘Aye, lad, tuck in now,’ was all she said, however. ‘There’s the best part of a week’s ration of meat in that lot.’

  Of course, Jackson couldn’t get into the factory when he went in search of Molly. He couldn’t get past the gate.

  ‘But I want to see the manager,’ he protested to the guard. ‘I only have a couple of days before I have to go back to my unit. I must get in.’

  ‘Not without a pass you don’t,’ the guard said stolidly.

  ‘Well, ring the manager and ask him to come down here, will you?’

  ‘No, I can’t do that, not if it isn’t urgent,’ the guard replied.

  ‘But it is urgent! I told you it was.’

  ‘You told me nothing, Sergeant,’ said the guard.

  ‘It’s my girl, she’s in there … she thinks I’m dead.’

  ‘If I did it for you, I’d have to do it for every soldier as comes looking for his lass, wouldn’t I? Write a note and I’ll give it to her when she comes out.’

  ‘But it’s only eleven o’clock in the morning. She won’t be coming out until the end of the day, will she?’

  ‘No, likely not,’ the guard conceded. ‘But you don’t expect her to come out when she’s supposed to be working, do you? The work here’s important, like. There’s a war on, you know.’

  ‘Aye, I do,’ said Jackson in exasperation. ‘I’m a soldier or
haven’t you noticed?’

  The guard bristled. ‘I see you’re wearing a uniform, but then any fifth columnist could get hold of a uniform, couldn’t he?’

  Jackson controlled his rising temper and dug into the breast pocket of his battledress for his identity card. ‘There! Now will you get her?’

  The guard took his time about examining the card then handed it back. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Well, all right, you’re a soldier on sick leave. Wounded in France, were you? Whereabouts?’ The guard saw Jackson’s look of exasperation and his voice hardened again. ‘But like I said, I still can’t bring her from her work. What’s the lass’s name, any road? I’ll see where she’s working and try to get a message to her. I can do no more.’

  ‘Well, thank God for that,’ breathed Jackson, who was getting to the stage where he was ready to punch the man in the nose. And that, he well knew, would get him nowhere.

  ‘Molly Mason.’

  The guard went back into his cubbyhole and began sifting through lists. He came back out, shaking his head. ‘She’s not here the day,’ he said. ‘Not any Molly Mason on this list. Mind, she might be on night shift.’

  Jackson groaned. He hadn’t thought of that. There was more time wasted until the night shift came on. After leaving a note for the guard to hand over to Molly, he walked back to the station and caught a train back to Bishop Auckland.

  He was back at the factory gates when the night shift was going in. There was no sign of Molly though he was sure he hadn’t missed anyone. He saw Joan Pendle coming along in the crowd from the station and managed to push his way through the throng to her. She turned as she heard him calling her name.

  ‘Jackson Morley! Well, fancy meeting you here. I heard you were back.’ She looked over his shoulder. ‘Is Harry with you?’

  ‘No, sorry. He’s in the paratroopers now, I don’t know where he was sent.’

  Joan’s face dropped. She started to walk towards the factory gate. ‘Any road,’ she said, ‘where’ve you been? We all thought you’d been killed.’