A Girl Can Dream

by Anne Bennett

  ‘Three miles or so,’ Will told her, wondering why she wanted to know.

  ‘So we could walk?’

  ‘You could, but we have the cart outside.’

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ Rose said. ‘But it will give me a chance to chat to Meg as we go.’

  Will took the travel bag that Rose had been carrying and said briskly, ‘Well, I’ll relieve you of that anyway, and when you are ready there will be a welcome and a meal at the farmhouse.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Rose said, ‘you are so very kind.’

  As she watched him walk away, she put her arm through Meg’s and led her from the station. ‘Now, Meg,’ she said as they walked slowly together, ‘I’m afraid I have bad news about your father.’

  ‘Just tell me, Aunt Rose,’ Meg said. ‘Dad’s dead, isn’t he?’

  Rose nodded. ‘Yes, I’m sorry, my dear, he is.’

  Meg turned to her aunt and said matter-of-factly, ‘I knew already, really, you know. I faced it when I didn’t hear anything.’

  ‘How do you feel, my dear?’

  ‘I feel nothing really,’ Meg said, ‘and yet I remember the great father he was to me for fourteen years. It was after Mom died that I realised what a weak man he was and it was that weakness and loneliness and need that gave someone like Doris such power over him. But now he’s gone anyway.’

  ‘He was left behind at Dunkirk,’ Rosie said. ‘“Missing presumed dead” was what the telegram read.’

  ‘Even if he was left alive, he probably wouldn’t have stayed that way for long,’ Meg told her aunt. ‘Stephen, the son of the house, is home from Dunkirk and he heard that the Germans were taking no prisoners.’

  ‘Yes, and I think if he’d been alive he would have turned up in some POW camp by now. Apparently the telegram came about three weeks ago but Doris didn’t tell me immediately.’

  ‘Well, that’s not your fault, Aunt Rosie,’ Meg assured her aunt.

  Rosie was feeling extremely uncomfortable, but knew that Meg deserved to know it all. ‘Doris might not have wanted us to know the facts about your father, but she was quick enough to tell others.’

  ‘What others?’

  ‘The orphanage where Ruth is,’ Rosie said. ‘As soon as she got that letter, she went to there to tell them that Ruth was now technically an orphan because she was no blood relation, but she has grandparents living in Ireland who would probably take her in.’

  ‘But you’re a blood relation’ Meg cried.

  ‘Course I am,’ Rosie said. ‘But Doris didn’t tell them about me and when I tried and said I was ready and willing to have her, they said the adoption was going through now and Doris had given her permission so it was out of their hands. Tell you, I was blazing mad but there was nothing I could do.’

  ‘Oh they’ll be ready and willing all right.’ Meg said bitterly. ‘It’s what they always wanted.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Rosie said, ‘they were only too eager, and arrangements are being made to transfer the child to Ireland.’

  ‘Oh, dear God!’ Meg exclaimed, because this was her worst nightmare. This was the very thing her mother had warned her about. The thought of her little sister in the hands of her maternal grandparents was almost too painful to think about. She couldn’t bear it, she really couldn’t, and she felt herself falling and the road coming up to meet her.

  When Meg’s eyes eventually fluttered open she was surprised to see Stephen sitting by her bed. He didn’t say he had been sitting there for some time watching her tortured face and remembering all that this young girl had already suffered. For a moment Meg was a little dazed and bewildered, and then everything came flooding back and she gave a groan. ‘How did I get here?’

  ‘You fainted on the road, and no wonder you did with all the news your aunt came with,’ Stephen said. ‘Lucky for you the doctor was passing just minutes later on his way to see a patient and saw you prone on the floor and your distraught aunt trying to rub life into your limbs.’ He didn’t say that when he saw the doctor carrying Meg’s unconscious form from his car that he had pulled up in the yard he thought she had died.

  ‘Oh God, is she …?’

  ‘Unconscious, that’s all,’ the doctor said briskly. ‘Had some bad news. Her aunt will explain it to you. Enid, can you show me where to lay her and turn down the bed?’

  Enid went off to do as the doctor asked and the doctor followed and Stephen turned his attention to the woman who had climbed out of the doctor’s car and was standing in the farmyard looking a bit lost. She introduced herself as Rose and said she had come to tell Meg of the death of her father.

  Now Stephen said to Meg, ‘I’d just like to say how sorry I am to hear about your father. We left far too many good men on these beaches.’

  ‘Yes, but it isn’t just Dad,’ Meg said. ‘Dad is just one more thing, if you like. It’s the others, everything, and I don’t know whether I will be able to live with the guilt, the shame.’

  ‘Guilt and shame of what?’ Stephen said. ‘From what your aunt was saying downstairs, you were more sinned against than the sinner yourself.’

  ‘Aunt Rose doesn’t know the half of it,’ Meg cried, distressed, but Stephen knew that Rosie did know more than Meg was aware of and she had tried to explain what she had said to her niece that had caused her to collapse. It was not the death of her father,’ she said. ‘Telling her who would be adopting Ruth was like the last straw. It all hinged on the promise Meg made to her mother as she lay dying.’ Meg had told them all about that and Rosie described Maeve’s parents, how unpleasant they were, and the harsh upbringing Maeve had endured at their hands. ‘Hard to understand it,’ Rosie said. ‘For Maeve was lovely, kind and warm-hearted to a fault.’

  Rosie looked at the people grouped around the kitchen table listening to her every word and went on, ‘Meg would have probably thought that an easy promise to make because all the years of Maeve’s marriage her parents had never been over to see her and she certainly never went there. They never even exchanged letters. Maeve told me that herself.’

  ‘So these grandparents don’t really know this wee child they want to adopt?’ Enid said.

  Rosie shook her head. ‘They have never even seen her,’ she said. ‘She was very premature and was in hospital when they came a few days before Maeve’s funeral.’

  ‘So what are the Social Service thinking of?’ Enid said. ‘Even if they were the best grandparents in the world they are strangers to this poor wee mite.’

  ‘Yes, and they are as far from the best grandparents in the world as it is possible to be,’ Rosie said grimly. She went on to explain how they had wanted to take Billy and Sally back with them after the funeral and what an idyllic life they told Charlie the children would have in Ireland to tempt him, but that in the end he had refused to be parted from them.

  ‘No one breathed easy till they went home, though,’ Rose said. ‘And now this.’

  That was when Stephen stomped his way painfully upstairs and took up vigil by the bed. Now he picked one of Meg’s hands and said, ‘Please don’t upset yourself. Rosie has told me everything, and none of it is your fault.’

  ‘I have failed my mother, failed them all.’ Meg said. Her voice broke and she gave a cry of anguish that tore at Stephen’s heart.

  The tears came then, not gentle easing tears but great sobs that shook her whole body, There was no way on God’s earth that Stephen could have stopped his arms going around her and he shifted to the bed so he could hold her tight, upset himself at witnessing such pain affecting the girl that had a special place in his heart.

  The people downstairs heard the howl Meg had made and her sobbing, and Enid crept up the stairs to see if she was all right, pushed the door ajar. What she saw stopped the heart in her throat for she saw her son holding Meg as if his whole life depended on it and from the look on his tear-stained face she knew with certainty that no one else was needed in that room. She turned and went quietly downstairs.

  ‘She is all right,’ she
said when she reached the kitchen.

  ‘Stephen’s still with her?’ Rosie asked

  ‘Oh, yes, and suffering alongside her,’ Enid said. ‘They need no one else just at the moment.’

  When Meg’s tears were finally spent she felt light-headed and empty, and she still lay against Stephen, glad of his arms around her. She didn’t protest when he pushed the hair back from her face so tenderly and gave her a gentle kiss on the lips before saying, ‘Believe me my darling girl, none of this is your fault.’

  ‘Even if I were totally blameless it wouldn’t change the outcome one bit,’ Meg said. ‘And I am helpless to do anything about my little sister’s adoption.’ Then she gave a gigantic sigh and, as if she had mentally straightened her shoulders, said, ‘So I must learn to deal with it.’

  Stephen had immense respect for Meg’s courage. ‘Are you able to go down yet?’ he asked. ‘They will be wondering, but if you are not willing to face it, my mother will, I’m sure, bring you some food up on a tray. I couldn’t manage to carry it with my gammy leg.’

  ‘No, I’ll get up,’ Meg said, but when she got out of bed her legs felt very shaky and Stephen steadied her. ‘It’s like the blind leading the blind,’ he said with a wan smile. ‘How I wish I could catch you up in my arms and carry you.’

  ‘No need for that,’ Meg said. ‘I’m quite all right now. Shall we go down?’

  Everyone was very gentle with Meg and even the doctor called in on his way back from tending his patient to see if she was all right. She said she was fine, though she didn’t think she would ever be fine again. But she refused the tablets he wanted to give her, saying she had work to do and she’d found working hard was the best medicine.

  She was sorry to say goodbye to her aunt, but as the days passed and the battles in the air continued, she thought more about her father. She felt bad that she hadn’t mourned him more.

  ‘It’s because it hasn’t really sunk in yet,’ Joy said when she confided in her one night as they undressed for bed. ‘It isn’t as if you are living at home and he was coming in the door every evening. I mean, the only thing different is that you won’t be getting the letters he used to send and I know that you often struggled to find things to say in your replies.’

  ‘Yeah, I did,’ Meg admitted. ‘But what I will miss most of all will be him just being there. In one way, too though, I’m glad that he never knew of the duplicity of his so-called wife because Aunt Rosie said she was carrying on with others even before Dad was called up. She said she didn’t believe it at first, but plenty of people had seen men going up and down to that flat she had used to have on Bristol Street so in the end she followed her and they were right. And Nicholas says she’s taking opium.’

  ‘How does he know that?’

  ‘Says that anyone can smell it on her and I smelled it in the house but didn’t recognise it. The place stank of dirt and squalor and neglect, but overriding all that was a floral smell, sickly sweet, coming off her. Nicholas says that’s opium.’

  Joy was quiet for a little moment and then she said quietly. ‘I know it’s harsh, but your dad might have done Ruth a favour putting her in an orphanage. Better there than living with some drug-crazed nymphomaniac.’

  ‘I can even agree with that,’ Meg said. ‘But now she is going to my mother’s parents, which is the last place on earth that Mom would have wanted her taken. I am certain sure they will abuse her and she is too far away for me to do anything about it, and I find that hard to take.’

  Joy put her arms around Meg and hugged her tight.

  ‘Don’t be too kind or I’ll blub,’ Meg warned. ‘I’ve found the solution to heartache is hard work and I am just thankful that there is so much of it here.’

  A week later and not a million miles away, as the sky was just beginning to darken, three children were crawling out of a sizeable hole they had made in the very back of the barn where they had slept for the last ten months.

  Jenny was excited because she had thought of running away from this place for ages and when she found some rotten boards at the back of the barn it had been easy to work at them until she, Sally and Billy had made a hole large enough for them to wriggle through, but small enough to be hidden with a pile of sacks from the eagle eyes of Lady Hammersmith. But when she had first broached escape to her brother and sister, neither had been keen.

  ‘I’d rather stay here,’ Billy said. ‘At least Lady Hammersmith doesn’t hit us and she’s sort of kind.’

  ‘Yes, but we don’t get enough to eat,’ Jenny said. That was true; they were often hungry. Not that Lady Hammersmith got much more. Jenny and sometimes Sally prepared her meals for her, and she often ate less than a bird and said that people eat less as they get older. That was all very well, Jenny thought, but they weren’t older and were sometimes starving. Often they lived on only bread and milk.

  ‘If we got to Meg she would sort it out,’ Jenny said confidently. ‘We need somewhere where we can be together, have enough to eat and go to school.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t mind not going to school,’ Billy said.

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ Jenny said. ‘We’ve all had months off already. Do you want to grow up an ignoramus?’

  ‘Too late,’ Sally said. ‘He already is one.’

  ‘Shut up, you,’ Billy said, who had no idea what an ignoramus was but thought it didn’t sound a very nice sort of person to be.

  Sally wasn’t taking any notice of Billy, though, because something else was bothering her. ‘But, Jenny, we don’t know where Meg is.’

  ‘Terry will know, though, so we’ll make for there.’

  ‘That’s miles away,’ Sally said. ‘How will we know the way?’

  ‘How did we get here?’

  ‘By train.’

  ‘Then we find the railway line and go in the opposite direction.’

  ‘Oh, that’s clever,’ Sally said.

  ‘Common sense, that’s all,’ Jenny told her. ‘And if it turns out to be a long, long way, then we can try hitching a lift, but not till we’re well away from here. Agreed?’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Sally and Billy.

  Before they set off that night, though, Jenny sneaked into the kitchen and stuffed a large loaf and cheese into a bag.

  ‘Isn’t that stealing?’ whispered Sally.

  ‘No, it’s necessary,’ Jenny said shortly. ‘Just at the moment our need is greater than Lady Hammersmith’s.’

  They knew the direction the railway lay in, because they’d heard the trains on a fairly regular basis. It was a fine night and still fairly warm. There was only a half-moon shining through the dusk, but as the darkness deepened, twinkling stars appeared and though they’d set off in fairly high spirits, they found it depressing to trudge mile after mile in the dark next to a railway track. But they kept moving, one foot before the other, desperate to put as much distance as possible between themselves and Lady Hammersmith before their disappearance was discovered. They had been walking at a fairly robust pace for about two and a half hours when Billy keeled over onto the railway, literally fallen asleep on his feet, and Jenny called a halt.

  ‘We can’t stay by the railway line – we will soon be spotted,’ she said, but fortunately they found undergrowth not far away, which they crawled into, glad of their overcoats Jenny had insisted they bring, which they used as coverings. Billy and Sally were soon asleep but Jenny lay awake feeling the burden of responsibility lying heavily on her.

  She heard a train rattle past along the track they had just left, but saw nothing but the fire truck at the front: the rest of the train was blacked out. There were the snuffling and rustling of small nocturnal animals all around her, and she heard the hoot of an owl and the thin howl of a dog fox on the prowl before eventually her eyelids fluttered shut.

  They were wakened by the cold in the very early morning. The sun was not up but there was a glow on the horizon, so Jenny knew it was early. She broke the bread in half and did the same to the cheese and then broke that into th
ree pieces. It was a very meagre breakfast, but not even Billy raised a complaint and they were soon on their way again.

  After walking for another hour, and when the tip of the sun was just visible, they saw a station in the distance.

  ‘That will be Lichfield,’ Jenny told the others.

  But as they drew near, there were no signs to say where it was. ‘There was signs once, look,’ Billy said, pointing to the signal box.

  ‘Someone’s painted over it,’ Sally said.

  ‘What an odd thing to do,’ Jenny commented.

  There were no signs anywhere and no map either, though there was evidence that there had been both. The station at that early hour was quiet, but there was one train waiting at the station and Jenny asked a man boarding it, ‘Excuse me, but is this Lichfield Station?’

  ‘Yes,’ the man confirmed.

  ‘Why ain’t there no names?’ Billy burst out.

  The man looked at him rather strangely. ‘To confuse the enemy,’ he said. ‘In case they should invade.’

  ‘Goodness,’ Jenny said. ‘Are they likely to?’

  ‘What planet you been living on?’ the man said. ‘It’s all everyone talks about. The Germans would have been here now if it hadn’t been for the RAF who are doing their level best to stop them Names of stations and signposts have been painted over and maps removed, so that if they come they won’t find it so easy getting about. You really didn’t know all this?’

  Jenny shook her head and decided to tell some semblance of the truth. ‘We were evacuated to a really remote farmhouse, but now we must get back to Birmingham because our mother is sick.’

  ‘Oh, sorry to hear that,’ the man said. ‘This is the train you want. Be setting off in a few minutes and takes you right into New Street Station.’

  There was nothing to do but get on the train, because she knew the man would think it strange if they didn’t, and anyway an idea was forming in Jenny’s head. The man made for the front of the train so Jenny, grabbing hold of Sally and Billy, pushed them the other way.

  ‘We have to get off,’ Sally said.