by Nancy Revell
‘I don’t know about Vinnie, but Peter knew about the christening because I’d mentioned it to him that awful night I took him Agnes’s pie to say thank you for helping to look for Pearl.’
Gloria nodded, her face solemn. She knew all about the terrible falling-out that had followed Peter’s revelation that he knew about Lily’s.
‘Peter guessed,’ Rosie said, ‘Vinnie would try and gatecrash the christening. Luckily he caught him before he made it to the church.’
‘What?’ Gloria asked, intrigued. ‘Did he arrest him?’
‘Yes,’ Rosie nodded, ‘banged him up in the cells overnight.’
Gloria let out a big sigh. ‘Thank God he did. Can you imagine if both Jack and Vinnie had turned up on Saturday?’
Rosie nodded again, a grim look on her face.
‘Oh, Rosie, you must thank Peter for me. I don’t know what to say. Is there anything I can do to show him how much I appreciate what he’s done for me?’
Rosie shook her head. ‘I don’t think he would have said anything, but he thinks – and I agreed with him – that you should know what’s gone on.’ Rosie hesitated. ‘Just so you can be on your guard.’
Rosie didn’t need to say any more; Peter might have been able to avert a nasty scene at the weekend, but it was by no means a solution to the problem of Vinnie.
His overnight incarceration was just a temporary fix.
Chapter Eleven
Town Centre, Sunderland
Saturday 29 November 1941
Bel had a tight hold on Lucille’s little hand as they hurried past the grandiose, pillared frontage of the Municipal Museum and Winter Gardens, before crossing the wide Borough Road and heading up Fawcett Street, which had been teeming with shoppers earlier on, although the crowds were now starting to dwindle. The rain had stopped but it was still windy and as Bel looked down at Lucille to check on her, she saw that her daughter had a firm grip on her threadbare toy rabbit, which now simply looked like a dirty piece of rag. Bel had tried to part Lucille from her beloved cuddly toy, but to no avail.
As they both leant into the natural wind tunnel that always seemed to appear in the town’s centre on days like today, Bel passed a newspaper stand. The boy was shouting out the day’s headlines but his words were being whipped away as soon as they left his mouth. Bel sidestepped the billboard and as she did so she saw the words of the new headline the young lad was shouting out in vain: SOVIET TROOPS RETAKE ROSTOV.
Polly had been telling them the other night as they all had their supper about ‘the battle on the Eastern Front’ and how important it was for the Russians to hold off Hitler’s army. From Bel’s limited understanding, it seemed to be a case of one step forward and two steps back for both the Allies and the Axis. The Germans might take a town or city, but more often than not the Russians would then fight back and reclaim what was rightfully theirs.
And by the sounds of it the weather in Russia was deathly, which had worked in their favour as the German army hadn’t been prepared for the sub-zero temperatures. It made north-eastern winters look like a walk in the park.
Bel was just glad, though, that at the moment Hitler’s focus was elsewhere and that their town seemed to be having a hiatus from any more air raids. Although how long this would last was anyone’s guess.
‘Nana!’ Lucille started half singing, half chanting as they hurried past another cordoned-off bomb site where a row of shops had once stood. Bel looked up at the town-hall clock tower, built to evoke Italian architecture of the Renaissance period. It was about to turn three o’clock. If they didn’t get a move on they were going to be late.
Bel bent down and picked up Lucille, who was starting to drag. Her little legs were tiring. As Bel scooped up her three-year-old daughter, she found no resistance. Lucille happily put her arms around her mother’s neck and wrapped her legs around her waist, all the while continuing her excited chant for her grandma.
A few minutes later they were turning into Athenaeum Street and Bel was breathing a sigh of relief to be out of the windy turbulence. She dropped Lucille back on to her feet and purchased her penny platform ticket from the machine by the main entrance.
Bel and Lucille slowly made their way down the wide flight of stairs that led onto platform number two and as Bel watched her daughter carefully climb down each step she thought of how many memories this station held for her. She had come here often as a child for want of anything else better to do and would sneak under the barriers when the ticket collector wasn’t looking and watch loved ones waving their hellos or kissing their goodbyes as the trains came and went. It had been one of her favourite pastimes when her ma had either gone on a drinking spree or taken off with some bloke she’d just met.
Later, as a young woman, Bel had herself waved off a loved one – her husband, Teddy, when he had left for war – and like those she’d seen waving farewells as a child, she too had forced back the tears until his train had disappeared from view. That was to be the last time Bel ever saw her husband; she hadn’t even been able to take one last look at him laid out in his coffin as he’d been buried in North Africa in a place she couldn’t even pronounce.
In February this year, she’d returned to the station, this time with Lucille and Agnes, to welcome back Teddy’s twin, Joe, after he’d been injured by a landmine whilst fighting alongside his brother. Everyone in the family had been grieving in their own way, although Bel’s grief had turned to anger and that anger had found a target in Joe and was made worse by Agnes asking Bel to tend to Joe’s leg wounds.
Joe had become Bel’s emotional punchbag, but had taken it all on the chin; he had watched sadly as her deep-seated depression manifested itself in bitterness and resentment. As he knew it would, his sister-in-law’s anger at the injustice of Teddy’s death finally spilled over. When it did, he made sure he was there for her, and as the months wore on, the darkness that had taken hold of Bel was gradually replaced by the light of their growing love and care for each other.
Today, however, Bel was returning to the town’s train station to welcome back her mother and the half-sister who had introduced herself in such dramatic fashion at Bel’s wedding just three weeks previously.
As Bel and Lucille reached the bottom of the flight of stairs, the tannoy sounded out the arrival of the seven-fifteen train from London.
Bel lifted Lucille up again so she could see the carriages rather than just the tops of the huge metal wheels peeking up from the edge of the platform. The hissing and squealing as the black locomotive drew to a halt had Lucille putting her hands to her ears, causing her to drop her toy rabbit and cry out. They both looked down but the cloud of smoke that had enveloped them prevented them from seeing where the rabbit had gone.
‘LuLu! Isabelle!’
Both Bel and Lucille looked up as they heard Pearl’s distinctive gravelly voice, which had somehow cut through the sounds of the train halting. Pearl was leaning out of the carriage window, her skinny arms waving frantically at her daughter and granddaughter.
‘Nana!’ Lucille shouted out, her face breaking into a big smile as she was distracted from the panic of losing her toy.
A few minutes later the train was at a standstill and Pearl and Maisie were disembarking. Bel thought that they both looked tired, which wasn’t surprising after an eight-hour journey, but they seemed happy. Maisie, Bel observed, seemed in particularly good spirits.
Bel was more than curious about how their ‘bonding’ week in London had gone. It had come out of the blue, but Pearl had happily agreed to it after Maisie told her that everything would be paid for. Over the past week Bel had wondered to herself – and to anyone else who would listen, for that matter – how her ma and Maisie were getting on.
‘Look what I’ve got for my favourite little niece?’ Maisie’s southern vowel sounds, startling looks and, of course, her caramel-coloured skin drew curious glances from those who, like Bel and Lucille, had come to welcome loved ones back from their travels.
&nbs
p; When Lucille saw what her aunty was holding in her hand, she let out a squeal of delight. It was the cutest, cuddliest – and cleanest – toy rabbit that Bel had ever seen. Maisie had never said anything outright to Bel about the piece of stuffed rag that was now barely recognisable as a cuddly toy, but the look on her face and the way she flinched from it if it came anywhere near her had spoken volumes.
Bel put an excited Lucille, now struggling to be free, down on the ground so she could go and collect her present.
‘Rabbit!’ Lucille called, her little arms stretching out to take her gift. Maisie bobbed down so that she was at her niece’s eye level. As she did so, she spotted Lucille’s raggedy old rabbit on the ground. The second she spotted it, so did Bel. The two sisters locked eyes for a split second, before Maisie grabbed hold of her niece and picked her up. As she did so, she quickly kicked her foot out to the side and flicked the rag toy down the side of the platform. As she oohed and aahed with Lucille over her new toy, she gave her sister a wink and a cheeky half-smile.
‘Isabelle!’ Pearl was throwing her arms open as if she was about to embrace her daughter. Bel looked horrified. She couldn’t remember her mother ever putting her arms around her or cuddling her in her entire life. Seeing her daughter’s frozen stance and look of shock, Pearl dropped her arms but didn’t look hurt by her daughter’s rebuttal of the show of affection. Instead, she looked down at her bulging holdall.
‘Well then, give us a hand with my luggage – it weighs a bloody ton!’ Pearl’s demand, though, was said good-naturedly.
Bel did as instructed and she and her ma took a handle each and carried it between them as Maisie walked ahead with Lucille on her hip, her own, much smaller and lighter bag over her shoulder.
‘Eee, Isabelle, what a week we’ve had! It’s been quite an adventure,’ Pearl said, digging into her pocket with her free hand for her packet of fags and managing to pull one out and spark it up with the new lighter Maisie had bought her. ‘But,’ she added, puffing on her cigarette hard to get it going, ‘it’s grand to be back home where I belong, eh?’
Bel looked at her ma in disbelief as they hauled the bag up the two flights of steep steps. Until Pearl had tipped up unexpectedly earlier on in the year, Bel’d had no idea where her mother was. Pearl had probably spent just as much of her life moving around the country as she had in the place she had been born and brought up.
‘So,’ Bel asked as she reached the top step, ‘you’ve had a good time? I wasn’t sure how long you were going to be away.’ And it was true. Maisie and Pearl had left in such a flurry, neither of them had seemed sure how long they intended to stay down south. Her ma hadn’t seemed to care how long she was going for, which hadn’t surprised Bel as she knew that her mother would follow Maisie to the ends of the earth. She had seen how much Pearl truly loved Maisie when she had come face to face with her for the first time on Bel’s wedding day – and how much it had broken her heart to give Maisie up.
‘Aye, I wasn’t sure myself. You know, it being Maisie’s shout ’n’ all. But we got a telegram a few days ago from Maisie’s friend, Vivian. The one that did our hair fer yer wedding?’
‘Yes, Ma, I do remember – it’s only been three weeks,’ Bel jibed.
‘Well,’ Pearl explained, ‘she sent a telegram to the hotel we were staying at and Maisie said that she was needed back at work and we’d be getting the train back up today.’
Pearl started coughing and had to stop to get her breath.
‘I was glad enough, though,’ she said when she’d recovered enough to speak again. ‘A week in the big smoke was just enough for me.’
Bel would never come out and admit it but she was dying to know what her ma and Maisie had been up to this past week, and if they’d succeeded in tracking down Evelina, the midwife who had helped Pearl give birth in the Salvation Army’s unmarried mothers’ maternity hospital. Bel was also particularly keen to hear if Maisie had found out anything more from Pearl about her real father, other than he was a sailor from the West Indies. Maisie had told Bel before she’d gone to London that she was determined to track him down, which Bel did not disbelieve. All their chatter about unknown fathers, though, had really started to play on Bel’s mind.
On stepping out of the railway station, Bel and Pearl followed Maisie and Lucille as they went to hail a taxi.
‘Tell you what,’ Maisie said, turning around and raising Lucille into the air with both her hands, causing her to scream in mock fear. ‘I’ll do you a swap? I’ll keep this little cheeky monkey and you can take that cheeky money?’ she joked, throwing a look over to Pearl, who was trying to light another fag off the one she had been smoking, but was struggling because of the wind.
‘I think,’ Bel said, with a grim smile, ‘that I’m gonna get lumbered with two cheeky monkeys, but Maisie, you are more than welcome to come and take either of them off my hands whenever you want.’
Maisie put Lucille down and then turned to the driver, who had just got out of his cab, and pointed to her bag. The balding, middle-aged man jumped to attention and retrieved the holdall, flinging it into the boot of his black Austin and opening the passenger door like Maisie was royalty.
‘I’ll get off, then,’ Maisie said, stepping towards Bel and giving her a light kiss on both cheeks.
‘Say “thank you” to your aunty Maisie,’ Bel said, looking down at Lucille who was cuddling her new toy. She had not once enquired as to where her raggedy old rabbit had gone.
‘Thank you!’ Lucille beamed up at Maisie as if she was the best person in the whole wide world.
‘Probably see you all tomorrow,’ Maisie said, before climbing into the taxi for the last leg of her journey back to West Lawn, where she knew it was now safe to return thanks to Vivian’s coded telegram, which had read rather cryptically: THE COAST HERE IS LOVELY AND CLEAR. NO MORE STORMS. Maisie had chuckled to herself when she’d seen that Vivian had signed off: LOVE MAE X.
After they waved Maisie off and watched her cab turn left into Waterloo Place, Bel looked at Pearl and Lucille.
‘The walk’ll do us good,’ she said as she took hold of one of the handles while Pearl automatically took the other. Lucille ran round to her nana’s side and grabbed hold of her hand; her new rabbit was stuffed into the top of her coat, only its long bunny ears were visible and now flapping about in the wind.
Bel had wanted to broach the subject of her father with Pearl as they walked home, but she realised that wouldn’t be practical – not with the wind and the presence of her daughter, who understood more than she let on.
Bel was determined, though, now more than ever before, to find out exactly who her father was.
Maisie didn’t have a monopoly on unearthing family secrets.
That evening Pearl lay in bed wide awake. She had thought the whisky she’d enjoyed with Bill, landlord of the Tatham Arms where she had worked these past six months, and then the dregs of a bottle of Teacher’s she had drunk with her friend Ronald, who lived in the house that backed on to the Elliots’, would have succeeded in knocking her out. But they seemed to have had the reverse effect.
She could possibly put it down to the fact that her mind was still churning over the last seven days. It had certainly been all go and also pretty emotional. She and Maisie had revisited Ivy House – the place where Maisie was born when Pearl herself was just a child of fourteen – only to find the original building had been demolished. They had stood and looked at the bare patch of land and Pearl had told Maisie how she had arrived there and been taken in by a nice woman called Evelina, carrying out chores in exchange for board and lodging. When she had gone into labour, Evelina had been her midwife.
When they had found the new Ivy House half a mile away on the Lower Clapton Road, Pearl had been overwhelmed to meet Evelina. She was still a ‘soldier’, as they liked to call themselves, and she was exactly the same as Pearl remembered, only older. Maisie had been fascinated by the charity – and Evelina – and the pair had talked for a long
time while Pearl sat and listened, happy to be almost a bystander, immersed in her own private thoughts and feelings.
Near the end of their week away, Maisie had opened up a little about her own life. As Pearl had suspected, she had led a somewhat unconventional life. The parents Evelina had found for Maisie as a baby sounded nice enough, but within a year of Maisie being taken to her new home, war had broken out and Maisie’s adoptive father went off to fight and never came back. ‘The wife’, as Maisie referred to her, had gone to pieces and returned to America, where she was originally from, leaving Maisie in the care of her relatives. Although ‘the wife’ had promised to return, she never did, and Maisie had got passed from pillar to post, before running away at sixteen.
Maisie had been purposely vague about the exact nature of the work she’d drifted into, saying that she had been paid to be a kind of ‘companion’ to men who were rich and lonely, but she hadn’t gone into any more detail. Pearl was no fool, though, and knew that Maisie had heavily sugar-coated her version of reality, just as she wasn’t fooled by Maisie’s sudden decision to come to London. She guessed something had happened just before Hope’s christening and that Maisie was doing a bunk. She’d sneaked a look at the telegram Vivian had sent and it was clear that it was a veiled thumbs-up to come back.
Perhaps in time Maisie would trust her and, furthermore, want to tell her about her true life – both the one she was living now, and the one she’d had before.
Chapter Twelve
Monday 1 December 1941
‘Where’s Martha?’ Rosie had thrown her welding mask onto the ground and was pulling off her long protective gloves. She looked frantically about the yard, her hand protecting her eyes from the glare of the sun, which had made an appearance despite the bitter, icy cold weather.
The women welders all stood stock-still, their faces showing their confusion as to what was happening. The deep bellow of the shipyard horn had sounded out across the yard even though it had only been half an hour or so since its short, deafening bellow had signalled the end of the lunch break. The women were on the top deck of a 300-foot-long cargo vessel that, despite having two holes blown in its hull by enemy torpedoes, had managed to stay afloat and limp back to Allied shores.
