by Annie Groves
Hearing her mother speak about Charlie with so much new-found maternal enthusiasm was enough to silence Bella even before she’d taken on board the sudden transformation of her selfish brothers, with the hide of a tank, into a sensitive young man.
‘I’ve managed to get Mrs Wilson round to turn out the boxroom for you, but you’ll have to bring your own hot-water bottle.’
‘The boxroom? What do you mean?’ Bella demanded. ‘I’ll be sleeping in my old bedroom.’
‘Oh, no, dear, I’m putting Daphne in there. After all, we can’t expect her to sleep in the boxroom, can we? Not with her being a double-barrel. It just wouldn’t be fitting. She’s bound to be used to the very best. Pure linen sheets, I shouldn’t wonder.
‘They’ll be driving up today, Charlie said in his letter, although he didn’t say what time they’ll arrive. We’d better go to midnight mass tonight, I think, rather than church in the morning, with poor Charlie having driven all that way. What time were you thinking of coming over, because I could do with a hand getting the vegetables ready?’
Vegetables? Bella was outraged. She looked down at her nails and only just resisted the temptation to slam down the receiver.
‘I’d really like to meet Charlie’s young lady, Mummy, but to be honest I just don’t know if I’m up to it.’ She sighed theatrically. ‘Not with all that I’ve been through. And I don’t think that that bed in the boxroom would be a good thing for me, you know with me losing my baby like I did.’
‘Now, Bella …’ Vi began.
But Bella sighed again and said tiredly, ‘Truly, Mummy, I think I’d really rather stay here at home and just come over to meet Doreen at lunchtime. I don’t want to spoil everyone’s fun with my own glumps.’
‘Her name is not Doreen, Bella, it’s Daphne, and I really think you should be here. Charlie will expect it.’
‘I’ll have to see if I feel up to it, Mummy. I didn’t want to say anything but I’ve been very low today. In fact, I really think I need to go and lie down for a while.’
‘Bella, my vegetables …’
‘I’m sorry, Mummy …’
Two spots of angry colour were burning on Bella’s face as she let the Bakelite receiver drop back into the cradle. No way was she going to take second place to Charlie’s double-barrelled girlfriend, and nor was she going to peel vegetables for her. So there!
SEVEN
Christmas morning, and it wasn’t properly light yet but Katie could hear stifled giggles as her bedroom door was opened to admit Lou and Sasha, clutching their Christmas stockings.
‘Here’s yours,’ they told her, climbing onto her bed and settling down either side of her, silent for once as they focused their energy on the agreeable task of investigating their stockings.
This was the kind of Christmas fun that had previously passed Katie by and she soon found that she too was giggling every bit as excitedly and childishly as the twins as she delved into her own stocking to find a single peppermint cream wrapped in rustly paper, along with an apple and then another peppermint cream.
In their own bed, listening to the giggles, Jean told Sam quietly, ‘I’m ever so glad we didn’t get any bombs last night.’
‘You’re telling me,’ Sam agreed. ‘There’s nothing like sleeping in your own bed, and them rolls of bedding in the air-raid shelter are nothing like our own bed.’
‘I wasn’t just meaning that, Sam. I was meaning with it being Christmas and everything. I know we’re still at war, and there’s plenty that will be having a bad time on account of losing their loved ones and their homes, but it meant a lot to be standing in church last night singing carols, instead of being in a shelter.’
‘Aye, I know, love.’ Sam lifted his arm, pulling her close to him.
‘Sam, the girls might come in,’ Jean protested, but she still rested her head on his shoulder, enjoying the comforting warmth of his big strong body next to her own. Theirs wasn’t the kind of marriage in which either of them made a fuss or said very much, but it was a good marriage; a strong marriage, and a marriage rich in love.
‘When will this war be over, do you think, Sam?’ Jean asked.
She could feel his chest lift and then fall as he breathed in and then exhaled.
‘I don’t know, love. Churchill says we’re in it for the long haul, and I reckon he knows what he’s talking about.’
It was a cold morning, to judge from the thin film of ice on the inside of the bedroom window, but it was the puff of white caused by her own breathing that made Jean feel reluctant to leave the warmth of Sam’s arm and their bed, and rub her feet against his instead. She hated it when Sam had to work nights in the winter. Apart from the danger, she missed his warmth in bed. No hot-water bottle could take the place of a nice big cosy husband.
‘But we got our lads back from Dunkirk, and beat the Germans in the Battle of Britain,’ Jean reminded him.
At least the kitchen would be warm, and Sam had banked up the fire in the front room last night as well. There was something so special about Christmas morning.
‘Aye, we did that.’ Sam’s voice was fervent with emotion, but then their own son, along with his cousin Charlie, had been one of those soldiers who had been brought home safely from the beaches of Dunkirk.
‘But that doesn’t mean that Hitler’s anywhere near beaten yet,’ Sam warned her.
‘I just want it to be over and for everyone to be safe,’ Jean told him.
‘I know that, love.’
‘Luke may be on home duties now but that isn’t to say he won’t be sent abroad to fight later on,’ Jean told him worriedly.
‘If he is then we must just be strong for him, Jean, and for one another.’
‘We’ve been so lucky so far: Luke coming home safe from Dunkirk, Grace not being hurt when she and Seb were caught in the Technical School bombing, this house not being damaged; but I do worry, Sam.’
‘But not today, because today it’s Christmas,’ he told her with a smile.
Jean smiled back, and agreed softly, ‘No, not today.’
They lay in shared silence for a few minutes, and then Jean told Sam, ‘I’d better get up otherwise, if I know the twins, they’ll be downstairs eating the mince pies I made yesterday and then there won’t be a thing left if we get neighbours calling round.’
The rag rug at the side of the bed felt cold, and so did her slippers, Jean acknowledged, as she slid her feet into them and pulled on her dressing gown, before heading for the bathroom.
Eight o’clock, that meant that he’d probably missed breakfast, Luke thought hungrily as he increased his walking pace, his face glowing from the sharpness of the cold December air. There hadn’t been time to let his mother know that he was going to be home for Christmas Day after all because the sergeant had only given Luke the news just over an hour ago.
‘Word is that all them who can make it home and back to the barracks again before tomorrow morning can have unofficial leave.’
Luke hadn’t waited to hear any more, grabbing the presents he had bought for his family and stuffing them into his kitbag.
He could smell soot and the aftermath of burning wood; a dull pall of smoke and still air hung over the areas that had suffered the worst of the bombings. It didn’t do to dwell on the tragedies of the last few days, but no one who had witnessed them was going to forget them.
Luke wasn’t looking forward to having to share this Christmas with someone outside the family. It was bad enough that Grace wouldn’t be there, without having to make polite conversation with a stranger when all he really wanted to do was be with those he loved, even though – having been good-heartedly warned by Grace, in the brief conversation they had shared when Luke had managed to go up to the hospital to check that his sister was unharmed after the bombing, that their mother had invited the billetee to stay over Christmas – he had included a small gift of some handkerchiefs, nicely boxed, for the billetee amongst his presents for his family.
The city devastate
d by the bombs, so many of its buildings destroyed and damaged, stood proud in all its grey shabbiness in defiance of the enemy. Striding through the empty streets, Luke felt a lump come into his throat, along with a surge of love and pride for the place of his birth.
It had been a long year. The things he had seen and learned during the retreat to Dunkirk were scorched on his heart and his soul for ever. Some of them were things that could only be shared with those who had been there, things that had turned him from a boy to a man and put him on a par with his father, man to man; things there was no going back from. War did that to a person. It changed them for ever, sometimes for the good, and sometimes not. He had seen comrades, friends, screaming in agony from the wounds they had suffered, and begging to be put out of their pain; he had seen friends as close as brothers fighting to the death with one another over a place in one of the queues for the boats; he had seen sickening, horrific things that the boy he had been would never have imagined possible, but which the man he had become knew were.
He seen acts of incredible heroism and self-sacrifice, and acts of terrible self-interest and cruelty, and Luke knew that before this war was over he’d see more of the same.
He’d turned into their own street now, his spirits rising with every step he took. His mother would be properly made up to see him home for Christmas Day and no mistake. He’d go round the back, he decided, and surprise her rather than going to the front door.
He started to whistle cheerfully to himself.
They’d had breakfast in the kitchen, all of them cosy and warm in their dressing gowns and slippers as they’d eaten their porridge and drunk their tea, Sam manfully lifting the heavy roasting tin containing the turkey out of the oven so that Jean could baste it and check anxiously that it was cooking properly, before returning to their bedrooms to get dressed and come back down, all of them dressed in their ‘nice’ clothes, ready to gather in the front room where presents were piled under the tree, waiting to be handed out by Jean, according to Campion family tradition.
Katie, like the twins, was wearing red, but whereas they were in tartan skirts and bright hand-knitted jumpers, Katie was wearing a plain grey wool skirt and a white blouse and a soft red cardigan that fastened with pretty red and cream buttons.
Jean had put on her second-best outfit, the brown skirt and camel-coloured twinset from Lewis’s, although she had covered them protectively with a clean white pinny embroidered with holly leaves and red berries, which Miss Higgins had given her the previous Christmas. Sam was wearing a knitted patterned pullover over a checked shirt with the cavalry-twill trousers Jean had bought him in Blackler’s the year before the war had broken out.
A fire was burning warmly in the grate, and every time the front-room door was opened, the smell of roasting turkey wafted enticingly in from the kitchen.
The sound of Christmas carols being played over the wireless mingled with the twins’ chatter, and the ringing of church bells. Although from the start of the war the ringing of church bells had been forbidden unless as a warning of invasion, this year the Government had given special permission for church bells to be rung on Christmas Day and they were now pealing loud and clearly the country’s message of defiance to its enemies.
‘You’ll be missing your parents,’ Jean told Katie gently, once they were all assembled in the front room.
‘Yes I am,’ Katie agreed truthfully. But she was still glad to be here.
‘Come on, Mum,’ Lou urged. ‘I’m dying to know now what Grace has bought us. Do you remember last year, Sasha, when we thought she had given us slippers and instead it was a record each that she’d put in those boxes to make them look like slippers?’
‘I certainly do,’ Sam told them both mock grimly. ‘How could I forget when the pair of you made that much racket playing them?’
‘Oh – I’ve just got to get something, if you’ll excuse me for a minute.’ Katie stood up, well aware that the twins were impatient to begin unwrapping their presents, but unable to explain that even though she’d managed to get enough wrapping paper to cover the dilapidated cardboard boxes containing the china tea set, she’d been reluctant to bring them downstairs earlier, knowing that their size was bound to arouse everyone’s curiosity.
Katie, having carried one of the boxes downstairs and placed it carefully on the kitchen table ready to take into the front room, had just reached the kitchen with the second box when the back door to the house suddenly opened and a man in army uniform came striding into the kitchen, only to come to an abrupt halt, the smile dying from his eyes as he saw her.
Katie and Luke stared at one another in mutual shock and recognition. There was no need for any words: they both knew what the other was thinking and why. The silence between them, hostile on Luke’s part and heart-sinking on Katie’s, was only broken when Katie felt the box beginning to slip from her grasp and struggled valiantly to hold on to it.
Luke might be bitterly shocked and resentful that the young woman his mother had apparently taken to her heart should be none other than the stuck-up little madam from the Grafton, but he was still enough of Jean and Sam’s son to leap forward automatically to help her with the battle she was obviously losing with the cardboard box.
Katie, equally very much the daughter of two parents who by their own selfish self-absorption had taught her to value the help of others, reacted just as automatically, thanking Luke and explaining, ‘It’s for your mother, a tea set that Grace wants her to have as a special surprise. I was keeping it upstairs as I knew she’d wonder what it was if I put the boxes under the tree.’ Did she sound as breathless as she felt, Katie wondered, as she continued truthfully, ‘I’d never have forgiven myself if anything had happened to it.’
‘Katie, are you all right …? Oh.’
Jean’s face, as she told Sam later, must have been a picture when she walked into the kitchen to find her son and Katie in what looked like an embrace, until she realised that what they were actually holding so tightly was not one another but a large Christmas present.
‘I was just …’ That was Katie.
‘I was just …’ And that was Luke, both of them speaking at the same time in exactly the same tone and using exactly the same words. Katie’s face went bright red, Jean noticed, and Luke’s wasn’t much different, for all that he was hiding his self-consciousness that little bit better.
‘This is for you from Grace,’ Katie explained, starting again. ‘I got such a shock when the back door opened that I nearly dropped it. Luckily your son grabbed hold of it.’
‘And you with it, by the looks of the pair of you,’ Jean laughed. ‘You’d better take it into the front room before something does happen to it, whilst I put the kettle on,’ she told Luke.
‘There’s another one on the table,’ Katie indicated. Grace had been wrong about the kettle going on: Jean hadn’t even waited until she’d unwrapped her present. But then Grace hadn’t known that Luke would be coming home.
Katie had heard a great deal about Jean and Sam’s only son and she knew how proud of him his parents were. It had never occurred to her that the angry young man from the dance hall would be the much-loved son of her landlady, but then why should it have?
‘It’s just as well I got that bigger turkey, after all, Katie,’ Jean said happily. ‘Of course, Luke did say that he’d try to be here, but I didn’t want to get my hopes up too much. His dad will be that pleased. Poor Sam, it’s hard for him sometimes, Luke not being here and he having to live with four females.’
Katie felt the draught from the door into the hall opening and somehow she knew without turning round that it was Luke who had returned to the kitchen.
‘I’ll get my kitbag and get me coat off and then I’ll carry the other box through for you, Mum.’
‘Did you have anything to eat before you left the barracks? You’re looking a bit thinner.’
Katie turned round, expecting to see the same angry rejection in the blue eyes she had seen at the Grafton,
but instead they were gleaming with good humour, and Luke was shaking his head and laughing as he hung his coat on one of the pegs behind the back door. Beneath the khaki shirt Katie could see the stretch of his muscles and the breadth of his shoulders, and a funny and disconcerting feeling squirmed through her stomach.
The tea had been made and drunk, and everyone apart from Jean had opened all their presents, Katie’s face glowing with pleasure when she had opened her present from Jean and Sam to find a pretty little powder compact with the initial K picked out on it in sparkling crystals.
‘I got it second-hand,’ Jean told her, ‘but me and Grace both said that it was perfect for you the minute we saw it.’
‘It’s lovely,’ Katie replied, and meant it. Now she understood why Grace’s gift had been a Max Factor powder refill. It would fit perfectly into her new compact.
‘Come on, Mum,’ Lou urged Jean, her eagerness to see what was in the cardboard boxes overcoming her impatience to try out the new dance record Katie had bought for them.
Whilst Jean hesitated and looked uncertainly at the boxes, Katie discreetly started to gather up the discarded wrapping paper, knowing it would possibly have to be used again next year. The firelight burnished the bright reds and golds, adding to the festive warmth of the homely parlour, whilst the lights on the tree illuminated the dark green branches and the carefully tied-on decorations. The smell of pine needles and mince pies filled the room; you could hardly see the top of the sideboard for all the cards, and happily the garlands had stayed up – thanks more to Seb than to her, Katie thought ruefully, as she, like everyone else, waited for Jean to open her present.
Katie found that she was holding her breath as she watched Jean untying the red ribbon that Katie had seen on a market stall and immediately snapped up. It was as though somehow she had taken on an honorary role as Grace’s representative, she admitted. She was certainly mentally recording everything so that she could give Grace a detailed report on it later.
