by Anne Bennett
It had been a fine Sunday afternoon in mid-January just a few weeks before and Niamh asked if she could take the baby out.
‘Out where? It’s cold, Niamh.’
‘Just along the road,’ Niamh pleaded. ‘Please, Mammy, you can wrap her up well and I’ll not keep her out long?’
And Lizzie realised Niamh was proud of her little half-sister, which was far better than her being semiembarrassed by her. Georgia had plenty of clothes that had been Niamh’s or Tom’s, but Lizzie usually chose pastels, or better still white, to dress Georgia in. It looked so gorgeous against her dark skin, so over the top of her warm dress and leggings, Lizzie zipped her into a white all-in-one. It had a hood trimmed with white fur and Georgia’s black curls peeped from under it. She looked absolutely gorgeous and Lizzie kissed her as she placed her in the pram and covered her up. ‘Only about ten minutes, mind.’
Lizzie, watching through the window, saw that Niamh had not gone very far when she was stopped by two girls nearly the same age as herself. One of them was at St Catherine’s and she’d heard the whispers of the black baby at the Gillespie house as soon as Niamh and Tom began at the school. But she saw this was no black baby and both girls looked at her in awe. ‘That your sister?’ one asked in the end.
‘How could she be?’ the other said.
‘No,’ Niamh told them. ‘She’s a babby my mammy is minding. She has no mammy of her own. She was killed.’
‘Ah.’
‘Aye, and that’s not all, Niamh said, seeing she’d got the girls’ sympathy. ‘Her daddy is overseas. He’s a soldier.’ There was a significant pause and then Niamh went on, ‘An American soldier.’
That got the girls’ attention soon enough. ‘An American?’
‘Aye. He sends ever so many dollars every week for Mammy to look after the baby. Her name is Georgia.’
‘Georgia,’ they repeated. It was an unusual name for a baby, but seemed to suit the child, who was gazing from one to the other as they regarded her solemnly.
‘It’s a shame, ain’t it?’ one said at last. ‘Having no mom and that.’
‘Yeah. Good job your mom took her in, like. Must be kind, your mom.’
‘She is,’ Niamh said shortly, and added, ‘she’s the best.’
That made the listening Lizzie flush with embarrassment and she wondered what would happen when the children told their tale about Georgia in their homes, where most adults would know it wasn’t true.
But she needn’t have worried. The general consensus was that if their children believed that, it was far better than them being told about the rape. More believed in Lizzie’s innocence now, but some, seeing Scott at the door, had thought him to be Georgia’s father. ‘Come back to see the result of his handiwork and then off again,’ one remarked, and added spitefully, ‘Let’s see now if he’s filled her belly again.’ But even these people didn’t refute the tale their children brought home.
So Georgia became a regular sight on the streets, at first with Niamh, where girls would stop their games and nearly stand on their heads to get the baby to smile or chuckle at them. When she was out of the pram and toddling along the road, they vied with each other to hold her hand and pick her up and Georgia grew in stature and confidence.
Lizzie, who knew that not everyone would be kind to Georgia, hoped that confidence would stand her in good stead for the future. But she began to take the children out more, and fine weekend afternoons would find them away from the streets, she and Celia taking turns to push the pram and the children cavorting beside them.
Everyone began feeling more hopeful in 1943, especially after the fall of Mussolini on the 25th July. Everyone knew then, the surrender of the Italians was a foregone conclusion. ‘No fight in the Eyeties,’ Barry remarked.
‘Bloody good job,’ Violet retorted, ‘for there’s plenty of fight left in the Germans and bloody Nips.’
Violet was right, but everywhere there were successes, the Allies making inroads in Africa and the United States, taking over the Philippine Islands one by one. Italy officially surrendered on 3rd September, and just a few days later the paper reported the United States and Australian Forces in the Pacific had invaded New Guinea. In October, letters from Scott ceased.
At first, Lizzie wasn’t too concerned, for his letters were spasmodic. Sometimes she’d have none for a couple of weeks or more and then a batch together. A month had passed before Lizzie received the letter from Scott’s mother, and although she’d had many her hands felt clammy as she picked the envelope up from the mat.
Dear Lizzie,
I am writing to you with tragic news, for I received a telegram today to say that Scott is missing, presumed dead. I cannot begin to express the extent of grief I feel. Scott was my son, my friend, the rock I leant on, the one all the family looked up to, and he was loved so very, very much.
He talked of you often, my dear, in his letters, and I know he loved you too. Maybe he never told you. He never told me in so many words, but I know him so well and I could read between the lines, and I thought you had a right to know.
I know too, he was sending an allotment of his wages to you each week and I will continue to do that. I know he would want that done…
There was more, but Lizzie couldn’t read it. Her eyes were blurred with tears and she crushed the letter in her hand and sank onto the chair. She felt so low and depressed with the news and yet there was something else disturbing in the letter. Had Scott really felt something other than friendship? And had she? She didn’t really know the answer to either, and it wasn’t as if it made any difference now anyway.
In this frame of mind she was almost unaffected by the news announced from the pulpit the following Sunday that Flo had died.
‘Gladys was glaring at me,’ she told Celia on her return from Mass, ‘and a couple of her cronies too, but for God’s sake the woman was evil and no great loss to society.’
‘I’d go further,’ Celia said, ‘and say the world will be a better place without her.’
‘And,’ Lizzie continued, ‘I don’t care what anyone thinks, I’m not going to her funeral; though I might trot along later and dance a jig on her grave.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ Celia said with a laugh. ‘Let’s do the whole hog and make it a highland fling.’
‘You’re on,’ said Lizzie.
‘The pair of you are clean barmy,’ Violet put in, but she was pleased to see a smile on Lizzie’s face, for she’d been more upset about Scott’s death than she let on. ‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘if Neil will be at the funeral.’
‘Oh God,’ Lizzie cried. ‘That’s a good reason not to go, for if I see his mean, sneaky face near me again, I won’t be responsible for my actions.’
‘We’d have to go armed with a poker and give him another crack of it.’
‘Aye, and do the job properly and kill him outright this time,’ Lizzie said. ‘And then we could roll him in on top of his mother.’
Lizzie’s laughter had a hint of hysteria to it, but Violet didn’t wonder at it and hoped her life would be smoother from now on.
Tressa came back in November, when everyone was aware that something big was happening on the south coast. No one knew anything; the south coast was out of bounds to civilians and a veil of secrecy drawn over it, and yet by the New Year rumours were abounding.
‘They say the roads are impassable, blocked with army trucks and such like,’ Celia told them.
‘That’s what I heard an’ all,’ Violet said. ‘And the fields covered with tents and the place full of soldiers.’
‘They’re building up for invasion,’ Lizzie predicted. ‘They have to be. Oh God, another Dunkirk.’
‘Come on, girl, it needn’t be like that,’ Violet said. ‘They’ll be better prepared this time.’
‘And so will the Germans,’ Lizzie retorted. ‘I mean, they’ll hardly stand on the beaches and shake hands with the invading armies. No, Violet, whichever way you look at it there will be great loss of
life.’
Violet was silent, knowing Lizzie spoke the truth.
And yet nothing happened, though everything seemed to be heading south. Tressa came to see her with four-year-old Nuala, the only one not at school. As the youngest at home, she was delighted to find Georgia was younger than she was and the two little girls got along famously.
Lizzie was glad to see her cousin. She also saw that Tressa, freed from the rigours of a pregnancy every year or so, had begun to get a grip on her life. She’d had her hair cut and a Marcel wave put into it and had begun using a little make-up.
‘Only what I bought in Ireland,’ she said when Lizzie commented on it. ‘God knows what I’ll do when this lot is finished. It’s hard to get a bit of lipstick here.’
‘They probably think lipstick isn’t necessary for the nation’s survival.’
‘Probably not,’ Tressa said with a chuckle and a nudge in Lizzie’s ribs that reminded Lizzie of the time they’d been young girls together. ‘But it gives a girl a lift.’ She patted her ample waist and said, ‘This has got to go too. It’s all right Mike saying there’s more for me to get hold of, but God—I’m beginning to look like Two Ton Tessie. Anyway, Mike will find me half the woman I was when…I suppose I should say “if” he comes back from this.’
‘Course he’ll come back.’
‘There’s no “of course” in this war, Lizzie,’ Tressa said.
And Lizzie was silent. There was no certainty Mike would return. She remembered how she had felt when Scott had been killed, and yet the man was nothing to her really. How would Tressa feel if Mike, her first and only love and the father of her six children, was to fall in battle? And yet she wouldn’t be in a unique position.
Lizzie decided to change the subject to prevent Tressa getting thoroughly depressed and they started to discuss Georgia.
‘Do you still hear from the people in America?’ Tressa asked.
‘Aye. Well, Scott’s mother writes a fair bit, and in nearly every letter she asks for photographs of Georgia. She even sent me a present of a camera. I suppose she thought I hadn’t got one because I won’t send her any photos.’
‘Why not?’
‘Look, Tressa,’ Lizzie explained. ‘They’re moneyed people. God, you should see the lavish gifts she sent for Georgia’s birthday and Christmas. The last was a dolls’ house. It was in a kit and Celia and I spent ages putting it together, and it turned out to be an enormous place with furniture too, all beautifully made, and wee dolls. I tell you, I thought Niamh’s eyes would pop out of her head and she’s played with it far more than Georgia.’
‘What’s wrong with a gift like that?’
‘I’m afraid that Scott’s mother will try and take Georgia away from me.’
‘Would she?’
Lizzie shrugged. ‘Scott says not,’ she said, ‘but people are funny. I mean, whatever way the child was conceived, she is part of Matt, the only child he will ever have. Oh, Tressa, I went through so much for this child, I think I’d die if she was taken from me.’
‘Ah Lizzie.’
‘No, I mean it Tressa,’ Lizzie said fiercely. ‘I know people are losing their lives daily on the battlefield, and I know too your Mike is in the firing line, but I also know as long as the war goes on Georgia is safe.’ She turned worried eyes to Tressa. ‘I know it’s selfish,’ she said, ‘but, in a way, the longer the war goes on the better. Sarah is kind, though, and every month forty dollars come for me with a wee note. I didn’t want to accept it at first, only she said Scott would expect it of her and it was him that started it. He said Niamh would think it odd if he was to send nothing when Georgia was supposed to be his child.’
‘Aye, she would, very knowing is that child.’
‘Too knowing,’ Lizzie said with feeling. ‘I said to her yesterday, she’s so sharp she’ll have to watch she doesn’t cut herself.’
When Lizzie heard the waves and waves of a planes flying overhead on the evening of 5th June, she knew with dreaded certainty that the invasion was imminent. She was out in the yard with everyone else, watching, for as Minnie remarked, ‘It’s like they’re emptying every aerodrome in the bloody country.’
The news broke the following evening with a broadcast from Reuters News Agency:
’The official communiqué states—under the command of General Eisenhower—Allied Naval Forces began landing Allied Armies this morning on the northern coast of France.’
So that was it, the invasion had happened and everyone knew this was make or break, victory or defeat. There was no middle way.
The scale of the massive operation unfolded gradually as everyone scoured papers and listened to every news bulletin in the quest for news. It seemed Minnie was right about emptying the aerodromes, for 487 squadrons of the International Air Force had marshalled eleven thousand, five hundred planes.
The British people weren’t told of the bloodbath, the carnage, the beaches littered with bodies, though they weren’t stupid and the sight of the telegraph boy delivering tragic news compounded people’s fears. And yet the sheer scale of the invasion awed most listening to or reading reports.
But the allied troops were pushing forward too. Pictures in the papers showed liberated towns and grateful people lining the streets to cheer them on, and hope began to flourish in many a heart that the end of this dreaded war was in sight.
And then on the 13th June a pilotless rocket landed in Kent. It did little damage and few knew then of the new danger that the Londoners would have to face. Called V1s, but termed ‘doodlebugs’ because of the high-pitched buzzing sound that would cut out seconds before impact, they were twenty-five foot long and carried a ton of explosives in their noses.
When these doodlebugs were joined by V2s that were completely silent, the effect on Londoners’ nerves was catastrophic, especially as they’d barely got over the Blitz. There was a second evacuation of men and women as well as children, all going northwards in an attempt to find somewhere safer to live.
But, this apart, everyone was feeling more hopeful and many sentences began with, ‘After the war…’ However, Lizzie wasn’t the only one who remembered the slump. Surely to God that couldn’t happen again. All those lives would be thrown away needlessly if the future wasn’t brighter for those that were left.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
It was the Red Army that found Hitler dead in his bunker alongside the body of his mistress Eva Braun, who he had married just the previous day.
On 2nd May 1945, Berlin surrendered to the Red Army, and by 7th May the war in Europe was officially over. The people went wild with joy: the church bells chimed out the joyful news, bonfires were lit on every hilltop and many a bombed site in the cities. Shopkeepers produced fireworks they’d kept for years for such an event and people pooled resources to have street parties for everyone. Those that began in courtyards quickly spilled onto the streets, where people joined together in jubilation and happiness that the dark days were behind them.
Lizzie took joy in her children she had grouped around her and was sorry for Violet, who’d miss Colin afresh, and Minnie, whose husband Charlie was one of the D-day casualties. The death toll had been colossal and the bodies of Stuart and Roy were just two of the thousands left on the beaches of Normandy. Neil hadn’t been killed, but had lost his left arm above the elbow and his left leg above the knee. The whole left side of his body had nearly been blasted away, and while the news brought Lizzie no satisfaction, she felt no pity either.
All in all, after V-E Day there was a bit of an anticlimax feeling. Lizzie felt it, for although the blackout had been lifted and the threat of bombs was no more, everything went on as before. She was also aware that the war with Japan was not over, and wondered bleakly one day, hearing fresh reports of battles in the paper, how long that carnage would linger.
Then, on 6th August, the Americans dropped a bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The British people were used to bombs—God knew, they had had their fill of them and thought they
’d seen them all: highexplosive bombs, cluster bombs, parachute bombs. But no one in the world had ever seen a bomb of this magnitude.
One observer, placed in the rear of the plane, wrote of what he saw after the bomb was dropped, and this was reported in the paper:
There was a giant ball of fire, as if the bowels of the earth were belching forth enormous smoke rings. Next, there was a pillar of purple fire tenthousand foot-high, shooting skywards with enormous speed. By the time our ship [aircraft] had done another turn towards the atomic explosion, the purple flame had reached the level of our altitude. Only forty-five seconds had passed. Awestruck, we watched it shoot upwards like a meteor from earth instead of outer space, becoming more alive as it climbed skywards through the white clouds. It was no longer smoke, or dust, or even a cloud of fire. It was a living thing, a new species being born right before our incredulous eyes.
‘Oh my God,’ Violet said, looking at the pictures in the paper. ‘Them poor, poor sods.’
‘Seventy-eight thousand of them, by all accounts,’ Barry added. ‘But don’t forget, American soldiers are dying every day, and if this shortens the war it’s got to be a good thing.’
‘But still,’ Lizzie said. ‘Seventy-eight thousand.’
‘It’s hard to visualise that number of people,’ Celia commented.
‘Not half,’ Barry said. ‘But surely to God they’ll surrender now?’
But Japan didn’t, not even when a second smaller bomb was dropped in Nagasaki on 9th August and killed thirty-five thousand people. And so, on the 13th August, a massed armada of one thousand, six hundred allied aircraft attacked Tokyo and at last Japan gave in. The war that had dragged on for six years was finally at an end.
‘Welcome Home’ banners fluttered from many windows that autumn, and the men began filtering back in their light grey, chalk-striped demob suits with the booklet on ‘Resettlement Advice’ to help them live on civvy street.
