An Army of Smiles

by Grace Thompson

  Sometimes they thought they heard the sound of laughter and distant singing, the ghosts of all those young men and women who hadn’t returned, still there but fading with every blow of the hammers.

  Baba came and was instructed to sort out the transport, repairing to sell where possible, the rest to be discarded and sold as scrap. To the girls’ surprise Walter turned up, having been given the unpleasant job of knocking down the brick buildings as the site was cleared.

  He had put on weight and his face was puffy with excess drinking. Rosie saw him first and came running to tell Ethel: ‘His face looks like a jelly taken too soon out of its mould.’

  They shared memories and he explained that although he could leave the Naafi at any time, he had nowhere to go. His family were no longer where he had left them, having moved away with the evacuees and not returned. ‘I didn’t bother to keep in touch,’ he admitted sadly. ‘I was away from home and I wanted to shrug off my boring past and start again. But now I’m left with nowhere to go.’

  Rosie felt sympathy for him. ‘Find them,’ she told him. ‘It can’t be that difficult. Talk to someone and get things started. The Citizens’ Advice Bureau and the Salvation Army are experts at putting people in touch.’

  ‘You won’t be the only one looking for your family,’ Ethel added. ‘And they are probably searching for you. I’m sure they’ll welcome you back with relief.’

  ‘And you’ll be a war hero, Walter, think of that!’ Rosie said. ‘Poor man,’ she sighed as Walter ambled slowly back to the office to do what she had suggested. ‘I hope he finds them.’

  ‘So do I.’ Being so utterly happy herself, Ethel found it easy to wish the same for others.

  Baba was full of loving talk and plans for their future whenever they met. Their lovemaking was as exciting as before they had parted so miserably when Ethel had left for France. There seemed to be no problems, they behaved naturally with each other without the slightest inhibition. Ethel knew that one day soon he would make their position official by proposing to her. Then he went home for a week, and again Ethel was not invited.

  She turned to Rosie for reassurance and pretended to find comfort in the kindly meant lies and fanciful excuses. ‘I don’t understand it. Why is he so unwilling for me to meet his family? We’re as close as two people can be and he knows I’m longing to meet them, to be accepted, yet he makes excuses and vague promises about next time. But next time, like tomorrow, never comes. He must be either ashamed of me or ashamed of them.’

  ‘That’s rubbish, Ethel. He can’t be ashamed of you. He hasn’t kept you a secret here. Everyone knows you and he are… well… seeing each other.’

  ‘Then he must have some guilt about his relations. They might be criminals. Or so poor he can’t cope with my seeing just how they have to live.’

  ‘On a more cheerful note, perhaps he’s planning a big surprise for you,’ Rosie suggested. ‘You know how full of fun he is. I bet he’s making plans for a huge party to welcome you, getting everyone making cakes and raiding their store cupboards. Getting out all the decorations. Now this minute they’ll be beavering away getting everything perfect for when you arrive. Imagine it, Ethel, just imagine the big welcome you’ll get.’

  For a while Ethel believed her.

  When Baba returned after his week’s leave he looked serious. Ethel had never seen him so serious. His was a face meant for smiling and to see the frowns creasing his brow didn’t augur well for his explanation. She wondered if there had been a tragedy in his family but he only shrugged when she asked what was wrong. After a couple of days she knew he was avoiding her. She and Rosie had planned to go to a dance in the nearby village on the following Saturday and, as they left the canteen on their way to the lorry that was to take them, she saw him walking into a store room. She stopped and looked at the door through which he had disappeared. It was no good, she couldn’t go to the dance, it was time to find out what had gone wrong. Something had happened and she would insist on being told.

  Waving the lorry to go on without her, and giving a hasty apology to Rosie, she went to the store room and called to him. The place was empty. She looked around and saw him heading for one of the partly demolished hangars, where the sound of metal being hammered into submission echoed around them.

  ‘Baba, please tell me why you’re avoiding me. What’s wrong?’

  ‘I’m getting married, Ethel.’

  She stared at him, a half smile on her face, waiting for the joke to continue. Was this his hesitant way of broaching the subject of their engagement?

  ‘I’m getting married, to the girl I left behind. There. So now you know.’ He stared at her as she watched his face, waiting for the joke to be explained, the half smile still masking her fears, until it slowly changed into a look of such grief that he almost denied his words and turned them into the joke she wanted them to be. But he did not.

  ‘The wedding is all planned, see, been planned for ages. The whole village is involved, everyone doing something towards the big day. It’s that sort of place, see, everyone sharing and helping one another. Wonderful place. I just can’t let them all down.’

  ‘But you can let me down without a thought?’

  He seemed not to hear her or perhaps simply refused to reply. ‘The families on both sides have come together to buy us a cottage on the edge of the town. Cheap, mind, but sound and with a good garden. All this was a surprise, see, planned by them all for ages.’

  ‘You must have led them on. Lying to them and not telling them about us.’

  ‘No, lovely girl, it’s you I’ve been lying to.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I honestly thought you were what I wanted, but going home this time and seeing Janice so happy and everyone presuming we’ll marry, and everything arranged—’

  ‘Go!’

  ‘But, Ethel, love, we could still see each other and—’

  ‘Just go!’

  She watched as he walked away from her into a future in which she had no part. Was this really happening? Was she going to end this war alone, and return to emptiness? After Duggie, and Baba, and even the dull Albert offering an end to her loneliness, was she to end the war more lonely than when it had begun?

  Rosie hadn’t joined the others on their way to the dance and she stood in the shadows watching. From the movements and the way Baba had walked, almost run away from Ethel she knew something was wrong. She called softly and walked over to her friend.

  In their room she sat with Ethel and encouraged her to talk until the whole sorry mess was out in the open. When Ethel finished explaining with great bitterness how she felt, Rosie said, ‘Ethel, love, go home.’

  ‘Why? There’s nothing there for me except a violent man who stopped his violent behaviour not from choice but because his body won’t let him continue. How can I go? If I walk into that house it will be interpreted as forgiveness and how can I ever forgive him? If he’d made the effort and learned to control his temper I might have been at least able to talk to him, feel some sympathy, but not now, not ever.’

  Rosie looked thoughtful for a while then asked, ‘Are you a hero if you walk into danger without fear? Aren’t you more of a hero if you’re scared silly and still go? Then what about a man who has a bad temper and struggles not to lose it? Isn’t he more to be admired than someone like you and me who keep our anger under control not through real effort but because we were lucky enough to have been born even-tempered?’

  ‘Nice try, Rosie. Fine words. But Dad never tried.’

  ‘How d’you know that? His whole life might have been a constant battle to keep his anger in check. The times he succeeded you wouldn’t have known about, would you?’

  Ethel’s shoulders drooped and she said, ‘Rosie, you’re very wise.’

  ‘Me? Wise? No, I just want everyone to get on, like each other. It can’t be that difficult.’

  Ethel attempted a smile. ‘Pity Adolf Hitler hadn’t had a daughter like you.’

  ‘Th
ere you are! There’s someone worse than your dad!’

  ‘Will you come with me?’

  Rosie shook her fair head. ‘No, Ethel. I think this is one thing you have to do on your own.’

  * * *

  Now they were in touch again, Wesley wrote to Ethel more and more frequently. At first the letters were short, with vague reports on some of the places he had been during his war. It was a surprise to realize that on more than one occasion they had served close enough to meet although they never had until that most unlikely of meetings in France.

  As he gradually opened up and told her of his thoughts, he talked about people and places they had known as children, and these made her homesick for those innocent days when problems were for other people to solve and their days had been filled with simple pleasures. Those days were gone for ever and there was no going back.

  Although Ethel couldn’t understand how, those letters slowly dissolved the barriers built on the day Dai had attacked Wesley and he, as that young and foolish man, had run away in shame. Much more slowly, from Wesley’s letters and Rosie’s words, an understanding of Dai’s behaviour dawned. She would never understand or forgive his cruel treatment of her mother, or the incessant need for violence that had sent him to prison so many times; but his worries for her became just slightly more clear. For the first time she could see that, although misdirected and badly handled, his concern was based on love. He was a man who dealt with things in the only way he could: with fists and heavily clad feet rather than debate. Words would never have come easily to him. She was aware of the beginnings of pity.

  * * *

  Ethel and Baba continued to work on the same airfield but their excessive politeness made it clear that there would be no grand reunion. The affair had ended and sorrow weighed heavily on both of them. Rosie supported Ethel by being as casual about Baba as she could, allowing Ethel to talk out her disappointment and humiliation. Discussing Baba’s betrayal helped Rosie to accept the end of her love for him as well as her friend’s. When they heard that Baba had moved on to another disused airfield Ethel only shrugged. There was nothing more to say.

  The celebrations on the final end of hostilities when Japan surrendered were an excuse for more parties, but for Ethel and Rosie the end of the war was connected with the end of much more and neither seemed able to get into the spirit of joy and relief felt by so many. It was over, no more men and women would have to die, loved ones would be coming home, all these things were a huge relief tinged with happiness, and they cheered with the rest, but for themselves there was no wonderful future beckoning.

  They were going home to the mundane existence they thought they had left behind them. Ethel couldn’t imagine living with Wesley, not after the excitement of loving Baba. Rosie knew that if she went back she couldn’t expect anything more than a return to a life in which Nan treated her like a little girl and expected her to wear knitted hats. Even the arrival of her mother after so many years of hoping brought little comfort. They both tried to make plans to escape their miserable destinies, discussing endlessly the grand schemes they thought up and soon abandoned.

  Wesley’s letters began to hint at love and early in September, as thoughts that there might be a future for them one day began to grow, Ethel realized she was again expecting a child. A confidential visit to a doctor told her the child would be born in March. After the initial shock, dismay and downright panic, trying to decide on the best thing to do, hope sprang into life and she wrote to Baba. Now he would have to marry her.

  As she waited for his reply, unable to sleep or forget for a moment her predicament which might turn out to be such good fortune, her thoughts were like a switchback ride. She wavered from the thought of a reluctant Baba Morgan as her husband, to the quiet uneventful peace of returning home and becoming Mrs Wesley Daniels. Days passed as the letter worked its way through the system to find him at his new posting. When it came, Baba’s letter was brief.

  ‘I’ll always love you, but I am marrying Janice.’ There wasn’t even a signature.

  * * *

  Wesley became ill. Since his war experiences he had lost so much weight that he was prone to every ailment, and influenza, a painful cough and suspected TB kept him in hospital for two weeks, after which he was sent home to convalesce. He wrote to Ethel, begging her to come home. ‘What shall I do?’ Ethel asked Rosie.

  ‘You don’t need me to tell you.’

  ‘I’ll stay with his mother, I’m not going back to The Dell.’

  Wesley was waiting at the railway station and this time the embrace didn’t falter and fade. She held him close, frightened by his thinness, feeling his heart beating against her own, drinking in the familiar clean smell of his hair and the unique scent of his soapy perfumed skin, and felt the comfort of a homecoming: peaceful, unexciting, but pleasant.

  Arm in arm they walked along familiar lanes, visiting everyone they knew, including the Baileys at the farm, where they reminisced about past summers and dreamed of those to come. Apart from visits to Rosie’s Nan, every moment of every leave was spent with Wesley. In October, when Wesley was strong again, he proposed and she accepted, and with their long delayed engagement revived, their marriage was planned for the following spring.

  ‘There’s only one hurdle still to clear,’ she told Rosie when she returned to camp. ‘I’m going to have a baby and I can’t keep it.’

  ‘A baby? But that’s wonderful.’ Rosie presumed, wrongly, that the child was Wesley’s, a result of their long talks in the room above the canteen in France, and she wondered if those private moments and the news of the baby had been the real reason Baba had left her. ‘Wesley will accept it, won’t he? He wouldn’t turn away his child.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ was all she said. How could she tell Rosie the child was Baba’s?

  They discussed the problem over the next few days, during which time Rosie wanted to confess her love for Baba and her belief that she would never hold a child of her own in her arms. Ethel was so wrapped in her own misery she either ignored Rosie’s attempts or didn’t hear them. When Rosie pleaded with her to tell Wesley she shook her head and insisted that adoption was the only way.

  ‘I have no desire for a child. It’s the wrong time. I’m not ready for the responsibility.’

  ‘And Wesley? Won’t you give him the chance to decide?’

  ‘This is my problem and the decision on how I deal with it is mine too.’

  Rosie pleaded and argued with Ethel, telling her she should keep the child or she would carry the guilt all her life. ‘I was fond of Baba and now I doubt whether I’ll ever marry.’ Realizing that Ethel was at last listening to her, she went on, ‘I mean really fond of him. I seem to fall for men who don’t fall for me. Duggie, then Baba, who both wanted someone like you and had no interest in me. I know I’ll never marry. I’d be so thrilled to have a child of my own and now I never will.’

  Ethel was unmoved. There was so much to sort out in her life. This child had the wrong father, she thought bitterly, but she didn’t express that thought to her friend. When she told Rosie she had an appointment to see an adoption society, Rosie surprised her by saying, ‘If you really can’t keep this baby then I will! I’ll write to Nan and tell her I’ve got myself in the family way and I know she’ll help me. My mother will too.’

  ‘But, Rosie, a child is such a commitment and you’ll want a husband and children of your own one day. You’ll forget Baba Morgan. I know it sounds impossible but you will, believe me.’ She almost added that Baba wasn’t worthy of her love but she didn’t want to spoil her friend’s dream.

  ‘I want a child and I know I’ll never marry. We don’t live that far apart and you can see him as often as you want. Ethel, it’s the perfect solution.’

  * * *

  The only other person Ethel told was Sid, who promised to help and to keep her secret. With a burst of honesty heavily laden with guilt, Rosie told her Nan and mother the truth. They took a lot of convincing, but wh
en Rosie threatened to leave and find a way to cope alone they gave in. They tried at first to persuade Ethel and Rosie to make it a legal adoption but that was something neither girl wanted. It was extremely unlikely that as a single woman Rosie would be allowed to adopt, and besides, Rosie didn’t want to be the legal parent in case Ethel should change her mind. Ethel wanted to avoid the long drawn-out legalities with the accompanying risk of Wesley and their families finding out.

  Ethel and Rosie excitedly made their preparations. If Ethel was less enthusiastic she hid it well. She pretended to share Rosie’s joy but all the time she harboured the secret hope that Baba would relent and come to find her and tell her he had changed his mind. She was ashamed of her thoughts, aware that, for her, Wesley was a poor second.

  Sid promised financial assistance and with their combined savings and generous help from Rosie’s Nan and her now thoroughly involved mother, Ethel left the Naafi. Rosie gave notice that she too was leaving the service.

  During the weeks before her condition was apparent, Ethel and Wesley spent a lot of time together. Every opportunity for a few days’ leave and occasionally during a few hours off, they met and walked and talked, restoring their damaged relationship. Wesley tried again to explain the reason for his disappearance, even though Ethel with slight irritation begged him not to.

  ‘I was so ashamed at the way I let you down,’ he told her one autumn day when they walked across the field on their way back from the Baileys’ farm. ‘I ran away and left you at the mercy of your father in one of his worst rages. How could I face you after that?’

  ‘If you hadn’t run off and called the police, it’s possible my mother would have died.’

  ‘I should have stayed to protect you. That scene haunted me throughout the war. It seemed far worse than the bombs, torpedoes and guns, leaving you to face your father.’

  ‘Thank goodness you did. It might have meant another funeral, and losing Glenys was bad enough.’ She looked at him, at the way his head was bent low in shame, hiding his face from her. She pulled on his arm, waited until he looked at her and then kissed him. Not in the rather formal way they had kissed since their reunion, but deeply, and holding nothing back.