The Most Precious Thing

by Bradshaw, Rita

  ‘Uncle Alec.’ It was a whisper, a cry from the heart. ‘Oh, Uncle Alec, please come back.’

  But still he couldn’t cry.

  Chapter Sixteen

  ‘What do you reckon then? Right pair of cards, these two, ain’t they?’

  Alec turned his head slightly in acknowledgement of the man who had spoken but he did not look at him, keeping his gaze fixed on the two red-faced and perspiring individuals on the makeshift stage. ‘Aye, they’re not bad.’

  In truth, the duo was getting on his nerves. For the last half an hour they had been singing such songs as ‘Hang Out Your Washing on the Siegfried Line’, ‘A Nice Cup of Tea’, and other sing-alongs, cavorting about like a pair of loonies in their endeavour to get everyone to join in. In the absence of official entertainment, most of those present seemed happy to oblige, but Alec was not.

  He shut his eyes for a moment, sighing deeply. Whenever he had imagined seeing a bit of the world - and he had dreamed of it more and more the last few years since Margaret had become so impossible - it had never been in the company of hundreds of his own sex. Most of them seemed to fill their time cursing and belching and passing wind of such intense toxicity that he felt certain the whole company would go up in flames one day. But he could take the smells, the exhaustion, the swill that passed as food and the lack of privacy better than some of the sights he’d seen. They went round and round in his head every time he tried to sleep, like that little Arab child this afternoon who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time and had got blasted to smithereens.

  He opened his eyes and stared blindly ahead. Their commanding officer had congratulated them today on inflicting heavy losses on the Italian troops advancing across the Libyan border into Egypt, but Alec knew he wasn’t the only one who couldn’t get the picture of that young mother cradling the mangled remains of what had once been her son out of his mind.

  The world had gone mad. He stretched his neck, flexing tired muscles. Stark staring mad. Every country he could think of seemed intent on killing, maiming or burning the occupants of another one, and all because one deranged rabble-rousing little corporal was intent on world domination.

  The wind that seemed more prevalent in the evening lifted the warm dust at his feet into his eyes, and he swore softly.

  The man at his side spoke again. ‘You want to be thankful you’re not neck high in mud. I went through the first war and nothing could be worse than Passchendaele. Me and my best mate joined up together and we’d covered each other’s backs all through, then one night he went to relieve himself and never came back. We found him the next morning by his hand stretching out of the mud. He’d fallen off the boards, you see, and it had sucked him down. Lethal, that mud was. They say hell is hot and blazing, but I tell you, I’ve seen hell. It’s thick and black and stinking and once it’s got you, it don’t let go. That’s hell in my book.’

  Alec couldn’t take any more of this. ‘I’m turning in.’ He rose to his feet. ‘See you.’

  ‘No doubt about that.’ The old veteran grinned up at him, his blackened teeth mere stubs. ‘We’re going to be slugging it out here for some time, you mark my words, but like I say, a few flies and heat and dust is nothing to that mud.’

  A few flies? Alec just nodded before walking away. A few flies he could take, but the swarms that covered everything twenty-four hours a day were something else. They were the real enemy. You breathed them in, ate them, drank them . . .

  He didn’t go straight to his kit; instead he continued to walk into the shadows as though he intended to relieve himself. When he was some distance from where most of the men had congregated he stopped, put his head back and looked up into the dark sky in which a myriad stars were twinkling.

  He was going to die out here. Die on foreign soil, probably with his guts spilled out in the sand and flies laying their maggots in him before he was even cold. Back home life continued as before. People were eating and drinking and loving as though nothing had changed. There were times lately when he wondered if he’d meet his end like Ted Stafford had. He’d suddenly gone berserk a few weeks ago and bolted out of cover like a rabbit with a fox on its tail, running blindly until he was shot by the enemy. There’d been nothing any of them could do but watch. And him with a young wife and a babby.

  The thought of Ted’s wife and child brought Carrie and Matthew into his mind before he could stop them intruding. He had found very early on in the mayhem that it didn’t do to think of Carrie. It was weakening, draining; it brought too many things he’d left unsaid to the surface and tied his stomach into knots. She hated him. Funny, but it had only been since he’d been out here that he could accept that. That was the thing about staring death in the face: it stripped away any pretence or wishful thinking.

  He screwed up his eyes tightly then opened them very wide and continued to stare into the velvet sky.

  Matthew was his. His by the act that had alienated Carrie for ever, and his by Matthew’s will too. His hand moved to the letter in the breast pocket of his uniform jacket. The boy had chosen to love him in spite of all his mother had done to keep them apart. And she’d tried, by, she had.

  His face hardened and his gaze dropped from the sky to the scene about him. Whatever he’d done that night - and he wasn’t proud of it, of course he wasn’t, but she had been there with him at least part of the way - it wasn’t right to try and keep him from his own flesh and blood. Not in times like these. And now Matthew was down the pit and terrified out of his wits, if his letter was anything to go by. He’d never have stood for it if he had been back home, whatever might have resulted from his interfering. Matthew was no miner, you only had to look at him to see that.

  Alec swore, loud and long, but it didn’t relieve the ache in his heart which had come into being when he had read Matthew’s desperate outpouring.

  ‘Hey, you.’ An officer was standing some yards away, peering at him in the blackness. ‘If you’ve finished, get back to the others. This isn’t a Sunday school picnic, you know. There’s a damn good reason why you’re told to stay together.’

  ‘Sorry, sir. I just needed a minute or two alone.’

  The man moved nearer and Alec saw it was Lieutenant Strong. He liked Strong, all the men did, and they respected him. He might talk in a lah-de-dah fashion but that was the way he’d been brought up, no doubt, public school and the rest. But he cared about the men under his command and furthermore he was as brave as a bull when the chips were down, unlike some who were dab hands at sending their soldiers where they were chary of going themselves.

  ‘Bad news from home?’ the lieutenant asked.

  ‘Aye, sir.’ Well, it was in a way.

  ‘Damn Jerries.’

  ‘Aye, sir.’

  ‘We will beat them, you know. Mussolini too.’

  ‘Will we, sir?’ Every man jack knew that with France finished they were facing two huge Italian armies, each with about two hundred and fifty thousand men, one here on the Libyan-Egyptian border and the other in Ethiopia.

  ‘Definitely.’

  ‘How . . . how can you be sure, sir?’

  Lieutenant Strong paused for a moment, and then he said, ‘I have a wife and two children. Do you have family?’

  ‘Aye, sir. A wife and son.’ He didn’t hesitate.

  ‘Well, every time the slightest doubt comes into my mind as to the outcome of this damn war, I think of Cynthia and my boys. I think of them under German occupation, of my boys being forced to wear the uniform of Hitler Youth and being indoctrinated by the Nazi machine. Then I know we will win. Anything less is not an option.’

  There was silence for some seconds, and then Alec nodded. ‘Yes, sir. I see.’

  ‘Now you get back to your comrades, there’s a good fellow. ’

  It was only when Alec settled down for sleep with a blanket on his lower half some time later that it dawned on him how instinctive his reponse had been to the lieutenant’s question. And with the realisation came the knowledg
e that he had crossed a line tonight. Matthew was his son. He would defy Carrie and the rest of the world to say different, and when he got back home - if he got back home - things were going to change.

  Chapter Seventeen

  A sudden crackling from the wireless broke the silence, causing Carrie’s head to rise sharply. There was going to be another air raid warning. The wireless always crackled when they switched the radio transmitters off. Carrie braced herself, and sure enough the sirens began wailing a second later.

  The sound jerked her out of her chair by the fire where she had been putting the finishing touches to a silk and crêpe wedding dress that Horwood’s van was collecting first thing in the morning. She hurried into the dark hall and shouted, ‘Matthew! Matt! Quick! Get up.’

  She had to repeat herself twice before she heard the thud which meant his feet had landed on the floor. Carrie darted back into the kitchen and grabbed the bag containing the torch and flask full of tea. ‘Matthew!’ she shouted again. ‘Get down here.’

  Since Matthew had been working down the pit he arrived home from his shift so dog tired it was all he could do to eat and then fall into bed, and Carrie was never sure he was really up and properly awake until she heard him coming down the stairs. Last week he had been half sleepwalking when he came downstairs and he still had a row of large bruises all down one side to prove it.

  The heavy daylight raids over Britain had stopped at the end of September and the Luftwaffe were now mostly coming at night. Folk had barely had time to voice their delight that the Battle of Britain had been won - Winston Churchill’s broadcast praising the RAF, ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few,’ had raised cheers from those who heard it - before an onslaught of a different kind had begun. Not that they had it bad, Carrie thought now. Not like Coventry or London, poor things.

  The thought of London brought David’s father to mind and Carrie shivered. Night after night the Luftwaffe were blitzing London, and Ned had written to say he hadn’t slept in weeks for the sound of bombs, anti-aircraft guns and the shrill bells of fire engines and ambulances.

  David had written back immediately, suggesting that he get out of the capital for a while but Ned had replied that as far as he was concerned it didn’t matter if you were north, south, east or west, if a bomb had your name on it, your time was up.

  Carrie shivered again, wondering why the wail of the sirens always sounded so much more ominous when it was dark outside.

  Matthew joined her a moment later, his hair ruffled and standing on end. He yawned long and loudly as he did up his trousers. Carrie handed him his jacket which was hanging ready on the back of a chair. ‘I hope your da is all right in Nelson Square,’ she said. ‘I wish he was somewhere else than there.’

  ‘You say that every time, Mam. Nelson Square is as safe as anywhere else.’

  Carrie glanced at him but didn’t respond to the irritable tone in his voice because she knew she did say it every time. But she couldn’t help it. Instead she said quietly, ‘You ready?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ He frowned at her, as though the air raid was her fault. ‘Although why we have to keep going backwards and forwards to the shelter is beyond me.’

  ‘You know why, Matthew, so don’t start that again. It’s safer.’ She opened the back door.

  ‘Huh.’ He pulled in his chin. ‘Safer than what? Safer than being down the mine every day? I doubt it.’

  She said nothing more until they were in the shelter. She stared at him in the torchlight. ‘I know you hate the pit, Matthew, but--’

  ‘You don’t know the first thing about how I feel, you couldn’t. Not unless you’d been down there.’

  ‘Matthew--’

  ‘I know, I know.’ His voice was resigned. ‘Da is a miner and Granda’s a miner and his da before him.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to say that. I never have, have I? I was going to say that perhaps you could do something else.’

  ‘And be a laughing stock? Thanks very much. It would have been different if I’d never gone down in the first place but now I have, I can’t just not go. And you know how it is with the war on. I’m a miner’s son. I’m expected to do my bit.’

  The last was so bitter Carrie winced. In the past few weeks since Matthew had begun work he had changed so drastically she felt she barely knew him. He never smiled, he never even spoke to her unless he had to. She didn’t know what to do. Strangely, he wasn’t so withdrawn with David, in fact she felt their relationship was better than it had ever been since he had gone down the pit. She just wished Matthew would talk to her properly, tell her exactly how he was feeling.

  She watched him as he climbed into the six-foot single bunk bed she had bought from Binns for seventeen shillings and sixpence when the store had been advertising their special shelter furniture. With Matthew working down the pit she’d felt he needed something better than a chair to try and sleep in.

  ‘Would you like some tea?’ she asked quietly, sitting down on one of the three hardbacked chairs which, together with the bunk and a small table, made up the sum total of the furniture in the small structure.

  ‘Mam, you can’t call that brew we have these days tea,’ came the muffled reply. ‘And no, I don’t want some. I just want to sleep.’

  ‘All right. I won’t talk any more.’ After a moment or two Carrie switched off the torch and shut her eyes. As she sat in the darkness, her mind immediately began gnawing at the question that always nagged at her when she had time to think, which fortunately wasn’t often because however much she agonised, she never got any nearer to an answer. Why hadn’t she fallen for another bairn?

  She didn’t understand why it hadn’t happened. It wasn’t as if anything was wrong in that regard. She liked their making on, more than liked it. In fact, if she thought about some of the things David did under cover of darkness in their big double bed, it made her hot all over, but it was a nice heat. Sort of glowing. But in the last year she’d begun to give up hope that she would ever be able to say to him, you’re going to be a da. It was so unfair on him after everything that had happened, but when she tried to talk to him about it he just said she was enough for him. Her and Matthew. But she knew Matthew was included to please her. Of course David wanted his own bairn, every man did, didn’t they?

  She hadn’t felt able to discuss the matter with anyone, not even her mother, for a long time, and then one day when she was visiting Ada - the old woman’s legs were now so swollen she was virtually housebound - it had all come spilling out, mainly because she had found out that morning that yet again there was no baby.

  Ada had listened quietly and then patted her hand. ‘Well, hinny, I know all about the disappointment each month an’ the hopin’ for the next. By, I tried everythin’, I did. Someone told me you’d fall if you drank stout an’ I fair lived on the stuff for a time, till Charlie got the idea I was turnin’ into a soak. Mind, that was one of the more pleasant things. Someone else said if you slept with a peeled onion under your pillow you’d have a bairn within nine months; it was a good job Charlie had trouble with his adenoids an’ couldn’t smell a thing ’cos everythin’ stank to high heaven. I tried smearin’ me you-know-what with goose grease, wearin’ a tassel of bairn’s hair under me clothes, drinkin’ a potion made with mornin’ dew an’ nettles, turnin’ round three times before I got into bed of a night an’ three come mornin’ - you name it, lass, an’ I tried it.’

  Carrie’s smile encouraged Ada to continue. ‘Some bright spark said you had to lie with your legs in the air after. Now I’ve never been what you’d call a slip of a thing, an’ tryin’ to keep me legs up without Charlie catchin’ on wasn’t easy. He was a man who was always snorin’ within seconds after, but there’d be me with me legs over me head an’ me back breakin’. Damn near brained him once or twice when I slipped sideways. Nowt worked though.’ And then Ada patted her again. ‘But at least you an’ David have got your Matthew, lass. That’s a comfort to you both.’
>
  Carrie had never wanted to confide her secret to someone as much as she did then but she just nodded, and since that time they had not talked of it again.

  She must have been dozing when the explosion came but as her eyes flew open she knew it was Southwick way. She leaped up and opened the door into the backyard. The glow westwards confirmed her fears. Two more ground-shaking thuds came shortly after she was out in the open, anti-aircraft fire providing a constant smattering in the background. Her mam and da and the twins! And Lillian lived in Wellington Street just off the Green. Billy was all right, he and his new wife of three months had taken rooms in Liddell Terrace not far from Palmers. Her mam had tried to dissuade Billy from moving there, saying it was too close to the quays with their cranes and industry, but it looked as though it had been safer after all.