Where the Heart Is

by Annie Groves

  ‘They have made it clear that they only want young women who can be vouched for as both capable of doing the work they will be called upon to do, and who can be trusted to behave sensibly in the company of young men.’ She paused and looked at Katie, giving her a small smile.

  ‘I must confess that I thought immediately of you, Katie, and if you would be prepared to take on this voluntary work you would be such a credit to me, I know. However, if you feel that you would rather not then of course I understand. It is a lot to ask, especially if you have a special young man in your life who might not approve of his girl mingling with so many young men, however properly chaperoned and respectable those meetings might be.’

  Katie’s initial response, which had been to shrink from what her supervisor was asking–she had never been very much of a party girl–had given way to a certain curiosity as her supervisor continued to explain.

  ‘I’m not involved with anyone,’ Katie admitted, ‘but I’m not sure …’

  ‘Quite naturally, you’re worried about the respectability of the situation,’ her supervisor guessed. ‘My dear, I promise you you need not be. My contact in the American Red Cross was at great pains to tell me that they only intend to take on British girls who have been recommended and then thoroughly vetted. The club you’d be based at would be what is going to be called the Rainbow Corner. It’s where the Del Monico restaurant was on the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue and Piccadilly. The British Government has commandeered the Del Monico and part of Lyons Corner House, and the American Red Cross is planning to create a ‘little America’ there for homesick GIs. It’s due to open in November, and only a very high calibre of young woman will be allowed to work there. The American Red Cross will run the club, of course, but they will need to take on some British staff and they do want some volunteers as well.’

  ‘Well, I’d like to help,’ Katie heard herself say, ‘but I’m not sure that I’ll be suitable. What will I have to do?’

  ‘You’ll receive all the training you’ll need from the American Red Cross ladies in charge of the club. As I understand it, it will be a matter of filling various voluntary roles, such as answering questions about this country, helping American GIs to find their way around the city, perhaps offering a feminine ear to listen to their concerns about loved ones left at home. If you would agree you would be doing me an enormous favour.’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure that they will want me, but I’m willing to offer to help,’ Katie told her supervisor.

  ‘Bless you, my dear. I knew I could rely on you.’ Her supervisor beamed. ‘I shall take you along and introduce you myself. Would tomorrow evening be convenient for you? We could have a bite at Joe Lyons after work first and then go along to the club?’

  Katie agreed.

  The battle had been raging for ten days, relentless and bloody, and now the infantry were attacking the German lines inland under cover of darkness.

  ‘Come on,’ Luke ordered his men when he saw the signal from their officer to crawl to their forward positions.

  No sooner had they got there than a burst of gunfire from a German position had Luke cursing and telling his men to keep their heads down, as they positioned their Vickers water-cooled machine gun so that they could return the German fire.

  All around them were the sounds and sights of bloody warfare, but Luke was too busy watching his men and the German gunfire to have time to be aware of anything else.

  Bursts of gun shots from the German position, from what Luke guessed was an 8mm gun, had him focusing on directing their own fire in retallation.

  ‘I think we got them this time, Corp,’ one of the men sang out, as he raised his head when the German gun remained silent.

  ‘Get down, you bloody fool, he’s probably holding his fire,’ Luke warned him, flinging himself down bodily on top of the younger man when his warning was proved correct and a burst of machine-gun fire exploded over them.

  Luke felt the pain rip into his leg, a red-hot black hell of agony, accompanied by the sound of Andy yelling and cursing and then silence, a thick dark blank nothing.

  ‘The corp’s been wounded,’ Andy yelled. ‘We need to get him to a field hospital.’

  The pain was everywhere: inside him, outside him, all around him, gripping him, tightening its hold on him, searing and savaging him.

  Someone was looming over him–a nurse. His sister Grace was a nurse. He tried to say her name but inexplicably instead he said someone else’s.

  ‘Katie.’

  ‘He’s trying to say something,’ the nurse at the casualty clearing station told the sister.

  The sister gave Luke a quick glance. The field hospital was filled with wounded men, some on their own two feet or supported by a comrade, others–the worst cases, like Luke–on stretchers.

  ‘Probably the name of his girl,’ the sister responded. ‘It’s either that, or their mother, or God.’ She looked up as the doctor reached Luke.

  ‘Sharpnel wounds, right hip and buttock,’ the doctor announced. ‘He’ll need operating on as soon as possible.’ Nodding her head, the sister waited for the doctor to write a docket to attach to Luke.

  * * *

  ‘So who is this Katie you keep asking for then? Your girl, is she?’ the nurse whose job it was to try to keep Luke conscious, the better to preserve his chances of survival, asked persistently, as she checked Luke’s wounds, a really bad one to his hip that would mean it would be touch and go whether or not he would live.

  All Luke wanted was to be left alone so that he could escape to that deep dark place of nothing, but the nurse wouldn’t let him. She kept on asking him questions about Katie. Katie, who he didn’t want to think about.

  ‘She was my girl but she isn’t any more,’ he answered the nurse.

  ‘Broke things off, did she? Well, more fool her,’ the nurse offered comfortingly. It was an automatic response. She’d long ago lost count of the number of wounded men whose girls had let them down. It made her feel ashamed of her own sex at times, it really did.

  ‘No. It was me that broke off our engagement,’ Luke told her, his voice strengthening with harshness.

  The nurse looked down the line of injured men. The doctor was still some distance away. Luke’s pulse, which had begun to grow fainter and too fast as the shock from his wound set in, had steadied and strengthened as he talked. Best keep him talking then, the nurse decided.

  ‘So why did you do that then?’ she asked Luke, keeping one eye on him and the other on the doctor working his way along the line of waiting wounded.

  ‘I had a letter, sent anonymously to me, telling me that she’d been cheating on me.’

  The nurse’s concentration flickered briefly from Luke’s pulse to what he was telling her.

  ‘And she said it was true, did she, your girl?’

  ‘I didn’t ask her,’ Luke said curtly.

  The doctor was taking a long time. Blood from Luke’s wound was seeping through his bandage. The nurse wondered whether she ought to leave him and go and get Sister, but she’d been told to stay with him and to keep him alert until the doctor had seen him.

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t have thought much of that kind of behaviour if I’d been your girl,’ she told Luke frankly. ‘Breaking an engagement without even giving me a chance to defend myself, and all on account of an anonymous letter. That’s not very fair, is it? I reckon if someone was to write to me and tell me that my chap was seeing another girl, and without telling me who the writer was, the first thing I’d want to do was find out the truth from my chap. Sending anonymous letters is what troublemakers do, not real friends. At least that’s how I see it.’

  The doctor was still three beds away and her patient had gone worryingly quiet and still. She must not let him slip into unconsciousness. That was one of the hardest things to stop the badly wounded from doing, and from unconsciousness it was a much smaller step to death.

  His eyes were still open, though, and he was listening to her even if he wasn’
t speaking. She had to keep him listening and concentrating. The truth was, though, that her sympathy now lay with his girl and not with him. You wouldn’t catch her letting someone else tell tales to her about her own chap and her not bothering to find out if they were true. The blood stain on the bandage was still spreading, and his eyelids were dropping over his eyes.

  The nurse sucked in her breath and, ignoring her conscience, announced sharply, ‘Mind you, it strikes me that you couldn’t have loved her very much in the first place.’

  Ah, that had done it. The eyelids lifted, the blue eyes blazing with emotion.

  ‘Of course I loved her.’

  ‘Well, you’ve a funny way of showing it, that’s all I can say, ‘cos it seems to me that you were pretty keen to believe she’d done wrong, and that’s not loving someone, is it?’

  All Luke wanted to do was close his eyes and escape–from all his pain, both physical and emotional, but the nurse wouldn’t let him. She kept going on about Katie, like sticking something sharp into an open wound and causing the same grinding throbbing pain in his heart that he could feel in his body. And yet despite his righteous anger there was something nagging at him, and, like desert sand on the skin, it was rubbing a sore place on his conscience, and worse, causing him to suffer a savage stab of regret. He had done the right thing, he told himself stubbornly, the only thing a man could do if he wanted to respect himself. Better by far to have ended it when he had than to have gone home and found that the whole of Liverpool knew that Katie was playing him false.

  Not much longer, the nurse recognised with relief. The doctor was only a bed away now, examining a man whose face was heavily bandaged. Poor soul, head wounds were often the hardest to deal with.

  She looked at Luke, about to tell him that he was next, when he surprised her by bursting out, ‘I had to do it. Katie might have sworn that she loved me and she always would, but how could I believe that? How could I trust her when I’m not there with her?’

  The nurse frowned. ‘Same way as she has to trust you, of course. When you love someone you give them your trust, don’t you? Just as they give you theirs. That’s what loving someone is all about, I reckon. That and not letting other people meddle in what should be just between the two of you. You know what I reckon? I reckon this letter you got was written by someone who’s got it in for your girl. Either that or it’s a woman who’s got her own eye on you. Either way, if I was your Katie I’d be thinking I’d had a good escape, ‘cos no girl wants a chap who thinks more of his own pride than he does of loving her.’

  ‘Right, Nurse, what have we got here then?’

  The doctor had finally arrived. He might have been on duty since before the battle for El Alamein had started, but there was no sign of that as he started to examine Luke.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Christmas Eve, and Emily hummed happily under her breath as she walked home after delivering the last of the Christmas cards she and Tommy had made together.

  She left Tommy at home under Wilhelm’s watchful eye. She didn’t want Tommy going and finding those binoculars she had managed to buy second-hand and that she’d got hidden away in Wilhelm’s shed. She’d had to do a fair bit of hard bartering to get them, and no mistake, but she’d managed in the end. Mad at discovering more about nature and birds and that, Tommy was, and learning the names of everything.

  It was going to be a lovely Christmas, it really was. Emily’s breath turned to white vapour in the cold air as she exhaled in happy excitement.

  When she’d heard the vicar saying during his sermon a few weeks back about it being Christian for people to befriend POWs and invite them into their homes for Christmas, she hadn’t wasted any time in having a word with Wilhelm, first to see if he wanted to have his Christmas dinner with them, and then when he’d said that he did, she’d got in touch with the farmer whose land the POWs worked, to tell him what she wanted to do, and he’d got in touch with the Camp and now it was all official and settled that Wilhelm would come back with her and Tommy after church on Christmas morning to have his dinner with them, and that he’d be picked up by the camp transport on Boxing Day to be taken back.

  Of course, Emily had made sure her neighbours knew about her plans, and she’d invited them round for a bit of something on Christmas Day evening. It wouldn’t do to set tongues wagging–not that there was any cause for them to do so.

  After that thrilling declaration Wilhelm had made to her back in the summer, neither of them had referred to their feelings for one another again, and nor had they displayed them. It was enough that they both knew how they felt. Wilhelm was a true gentleman, very proper and correct. There’d be no crossing over any lines with him, and Emily liked that about him. It showed proper respect for her.

  When the time came for things to be different–after the war was over–then they would be different, but right now it was enough for them both to sit opposite one another either side of the warm Aga in the kitchen, on those days when Wilhelm came round to work on the vegetable plot, drinking their tea in a shared companionable silence, occasionally smiling at one another, whilst they listened to the radio, Wilhelm warming his feet by the Aga, her doing a bit of mending, the two of them content in one another’s company.

  Wilhelm, bless him, like the kind person he was, had offered her his rations to help with the Christmas dinner, but Emily had been scandalised at the thought of taking his food, although she knew of plenty who were doing exactly that to some POWs under the guise of ‘welcoming them into their homes'. Mind, she didn’t want to be uncharitable. It was easy enough for her to refuse, after all, when she had a larder full of bottled fruit and chutneys and the like, thanks to Wilhelm’s good husbandry, a lovely fat goose to roast, thanks to the farmer, and even some home-made sloe gin, thanks to her neighbour’s recipe. Yes, it was going to be a lovely Christmas, at least for her–although of course there was still a war on. And for all that the bells had rung out in November to mark the British victory at El Alamein there’d be a lot of families mourning loved ones lost in that desert battle.

  Con glowered as he stared up at the house in front of him. Ruddy Whitchurch. What the hell had Emily wanted, coming out here? He hated the country, and right now he wasn’t feeling very warm towards Emily either, with all the trouble she’d caused him taking herself off and leaving him high and dry in Liverpool. As always when it suited him to do so, Con conveniently ignored the many advantages he’d been enjoying as a married man whose wife was ‘elsewhere’ in favour of feeling sorry for himself because he no longer had easy access to Emily’s money. And right now money was of prime importance to Con, which was why he’d had to come all the way out here on a ruddy unheated slow-moving train, just so that he could sweet-talk the wife who should have been close at hand in Liverpool when he needed her–or rather when he needed her money–into giving him what should have been his anyway. He’d had a hell of a time dodging his creditors, and dodging Eva as well, who thought he’d gone to visit a sick elderly relative. None of the mess he was in now would have happened if Emily had behaved as a wife should behave and had stayed in Liverpool. He intended to make sure that she understood just how badly she’d let him down, and what he expected her to do to recompense him. She’d always been a soft touch, and Con reckoned he could easily get five hundred pounds out of her.

  Con opened the gate and went up to the front door.

  Christmas Eve. How different everything was this year, Jean reflected soberly, as she stood at her kitchen sink peeling the potatoes for the family’s Christmas dinner.

  For one thing, there’d be no Lou, because she hadn’t got leave, and there was certainly no chance of Luke coming home to surprise them as he had the first Christmas of the war.

  Jean’s busy hands stilled.

  Her heart still lurched into her ribs every time she thought about the morning the telegram had coming telling them that Luke had been wounded in action.

  She’d stood here in the kitchen, on her own, with Sam a
nd Sasha both at work and Grace and Lou miles away, her heart thudding with sick fear, hardly able to see the words for her tears. It hurt her to think now that at the very moment she and Sam had been marvelling at the bright uniforms of the military band and enjoying being at Buckingham Palace, Luke had been fighting the enemy. Of course, no one had known then that Monty had given the order for the assault against Rommel to begin except those who needed to know, but nevertheless it hurt Jean to think that she hadn’t somehow sensed that Luke was in danger.

  That morning when the telegram had come, though, all she’d been able to think was that wounded in action could mean so many things. It could mean that Luke was injured and recovering, or it could mean that he was injured and dying, and she, his mother, had no means of knowing which it did mean.

  In the end she’d done something she wasn’t at all proud of. She’d put on her hat and coat and she’d walked as fast as she could to the telephone exchange, where Sasha worked, where she’d asked if she could have a word with her daughter ‘on a matter of urgent family business'.

  When Sasha had been released from her work to talk to her, her daughter hadn’t looked at all pleased and her first words to her had been, ‘Mum, if you’ve come to tell me that Lou’s getting another medal, then you needn’t have bothered.’

  But her manner had changed completely when Jean had shown her the telegram, and she’d willingly put through a telephone call to the hospital in Whitchurch where Grace worked, so that Jean could tell her eldest daughter what had happened and ask her if there was any way that Seb could find out anything more.

  Seb had done his best, but what a relief it had been when Luke’s letter had arrived, explaining to them what had happened and how he had been on board a hospital ship off Alexandria, having had an operation to ‘sort him out', as he had put it, but was now on his way to South Africa, where he would remain until he was considered fit to return to duty. He wrote,