by Marie Joseph
‘I thought Americans drank coffee.’ Sally curled her fingers round her cup. ‘Not tea.’
Lee shook his head from side to side. ‘Just goes to show you don’t know nothing. My pa’s ancestors were British and we’ve had a little old teapot in the family for as long as I can remember.’ He winked a bright blue eye. ‘I can see my ma right this minute putting tea into that old pot then holding it underneath the faucet.’ Then because there was something he had to get straight in his mind he failed to see the look of horror on Sally’s face.
‘But you have to boil the water,’ she said.
‘Were you waving someone off at the station?’ he asked quickly.
When she blushed, he reached for a cigarette, cursing his lack of finesse. He sighed as he struck a match. That was what they had, these English. They knew when to ask pointed questions and when to keep silent. Through a spiral of smoke he studied Sally’s profile as she turned her head away. To try and hide the blush, he guessed.
‘I came down to see someone I’ve known most of my life back off leave,’ she was explaining in that strange soft voice. ‘He lives in the same road as me, and he’s in the RAF, Bomber Command. I missed him,’ she added. ‘The tram was crowded and oh, well, I was just too late. He wasn’t expecting to see me, anyway.’ Her eyes were suddenly bleak. ‘He’s an observer.’
‘I see.’ Lee drew smoke deep into his lungs. ‘And he’s your sweetheart, is he, honey?’
Sally smiled at the old-fashioned word. ‘No, nothing like that. Just a friend.’ She reached for her bag and looped the strap over her shoulder. ‘I have to go now. Thanks for the tea.’
She held out her hand, and solemnly they shook. The watching eyes beneath the green turban widened with a surprised curiosity. As they walked out into the street together, Lee raised a hand and hailed a passing taxi.
‘I’ve plenty of time, honey. I’ll see you to where you have to go. Okay?’
‘Duckworth Brothers, Shaw Street,’ Sally told the driver, then tried to look non-committal as the American climbed in beside her and the driver twisted round in his seat, grey bushy eyebrows expressing his amazement.
‘Nay, lass, what do you want a taxi for? It’s stopped raining, and besides, you could spit that far!’
Less than three minutes later Sally got down from the taxi outside the red-brick building housing the light engineering works of Duckworth Brothers Limited, relieved to find that the blue-eyed American with a mother who made tea from tap water stayed where he was, raising a hand in a farewell salute.
Then she went inside, down the long corridor to the staff cloakroom to stare at herself in the spotted mirror over the row of washbasins, and think about David Turner going back without knowing she was sorry for behaving like a stupid child the night before.
‘So that’s it, chaps.’
Wing Commander Beaumont, currently in charge of the pre-war RAF station near Lincoln, was a man of few words. When his Squadron Adjutant, a fierce-looking individual with the ends of his handlebar moustache sticking out like Viking’s horns, had ushered David’s crew into his office, the Wing Commander clasped both hands together on his blotting pad. He gave it to them straight.
‘I’ve been in touch with the AOC at Group Headquarters to ask for replacements of three of my crews. Yours included.’ He waved a hand in front of his face as if to prevent any attempt at interruption. ‘Some of you …’ His deep-set eyes flickered in David’s direction before he continued. ‘Some of you have been on continual operational flying since the start of the war. It’s my opinion that you are due for a rest.’
Taking his pipe from its stand he turned it round and round in his big hands. ‘Tired aircrew are dangerous, and we can’t afford to lose any aircraft through exhaustion.’ He pointed the pipe at the six men standing in front of his desk. ‘You’ll be rested for two or three months, but I’ll do my damnedest to keep you together as a crew. You will be notified as soon as possible which Operational Training Unit you’re being posted to, but in the meantime … well … just take it easy, chaps.’ He gave his Squadron Adjutant what he considered to be a surreptitious nod, then smiled. ‘Thank you … that will be all. I’ll see you before you leave.’
With that they were dismissed.
There was a party that night in the Mess. It was a party where grown men behaved like schoolboys, where the piano was thumped until its player’s finger-tips were sore, and where the words of the songs owed nothing to the original lyricist. When David went to bed at last the sun was beginning to rise in the east over Lincoln Wolds. For the first time in his well-ordered life he was paralytically drunk, so drunk that his own mother would have blinked twice before recognizing him.
Shedding his clothes en route, he took a fire extinguisher from the wall and tucked it lovingly underneath his arm. Still clasping the extinguisher, he was shoved beneath the covers of his narrow bed by Jock, his gunner.
‘Well, at least somebody’s happy.’
Grinning from ear to ear, Jock went in search of David’s clothes, scattered like drifting flotsam all down the long stretch of corridor. Rolling each garment up with exaggerated care, he made them into an unwieldy parcel and laid them neatly at the foot of David’s bed. Then, standing to attention, he solemnly saluted.
‘Sleep it off, old man,’ he said kindly, then he patted the inert hump beneath the blankets, a sly expression creeping over his flushed face. ‘But you’ll be the first one of us fretting to get back on the job, old man. I know your sort.’
The sound of his own voice wavered and died away in his ears. With an undignified lunge he dashed for the door, the ten pints of beer in his stomach making their presence felt most uncomfortably.
Two
‘DAVID’S STATIONED IN Scotland now. He’s not flying, at least not on operations. He hasn’t written to tell you then? Ah, well …’
The glint of triumph in Edna Turner’s eyes was unmistakable. Already Sally was beginning to doubt the wisdom of her visit. There were times when the fanciful thought came to her that Mrs Turner was growing out of the sofa with its moquette upholstery and embroidered antimacassar taped into place over the back. They were all there, the trappings of loneliness. Knitting bag, library book, scaled-down war-time copy of Woman’s Weekly, and the Radio Times open at today’s date.
A wave of pity swept over her, only to recede when Edna fixed her with a hard stare.
‘I don’t suppose they would have you in the Forces? With you being deaf?’
The thin lips formed each word in an exaggerated way. Sally guessed she was being shouted at, and tried to hide her irritation.
‘No, they won’t have me in the Forces, Mrs Turner. I went for an interview and made a mess of it. The sergeant kept writing things down so I couldn’t see what she was saying, but the firm I work for makes small parts for guns, so I suppose I am on a kind of war work.’ She smiled a smile that was wasted, as Edna seemed to be fascinated by the wallpaper.
‘I hope David doesn’t have to go back on operations for a long time.’ Sally leaned forward. ‘Mrs Turner? Are you all right?’
Edna had been feeling ill for a few days. She always felt like this when winter had finally gone and the flop-headed pansies came up once again in the back garden. It was as though everything was coming to life, mocking her because her own life had ended on the day her husband had fallen wounded into a shell-hole and drowned in Flanders mud.
He should have been here now, that other David, the one whose face she could barely remember, keeping her company night after night.
‘He never saw his son, you know.’
Her voice was light and conversational, and after she had spoken she went back to staring at the wall behind Sally’s head. She couldn’t bear to look at the girl if the truth were known. She didn’t like her and never had.
‘Sally Barnes’s mother is common. As common as dirt. She goes with soldiers, you know.’ Edna had told David that on the night he had said he was taking Sally to the pictures
, and when he had laughed she had wanted to smack his face.
‘My husband was an officer in the Coldstream Guards,’ she said suddenly.
‘Have you any photographs of him, Mrs Turner?’
The girl was saying something, but she wasn’t going to take any notice. That girl sitting there, twisting one of her curls round and round her finger, was as bad as her mother. Edna had known that when she had come downstairs for something on that last night of her son’s leave and seen him sitting there with his head in his hands, suffering. It was all because of something this girl had said or done, she had known that, but she had crept back upstairs telling herself it was no good trying to find out what was wrong. David might have the same name as his father and look like him, but that was all.
‘My husband was a fully fledged chartered accountant when he went to France. With letters behind his name.’ Edna almost choked on her bitterness. ‘All that studying, and for what? If he’d come back we would have had a better house than this. Up by the park. He’d have had his name in gold letters on one of those office windows in Burscough Terrace.’
Sally chewed on her lip. Mrs Turner was talking to her as if she wasn’t there, as if she was using her merely as a sounding-board for her grievances. But she needed to talk, that much was obvious. Surprisingly, it was easy to lip-read the thin mouth stretching and moving round the words. Suddenly the reason came to her …
Once, a long time ago, before Edna Turner married David’s father and moved a notch or two up the social scale, she had worked as a weaver in a cotton mill. To make themselves heard over the sound of the clattering looms, women had mimed what they wanted to say to each other. When voices were drowned, lips and gestures had taken over, and Mrs Turner had never lost the habit. Like many a Lancashire woman before her, Edna still talked in that clear, well-defined way, the vowels as exaggerated as if she were indeed conversing with the deaf.
‘My husband would revolve in his grave,’ Edna was saying now, ‘if he could see what was going on. You might think this war is terrible, but you should have lived through the last. Day after day with long columns in the newspapers giving the names of officers and men killed or missing. And now they’re at it again.’
Her head drooped so that Sally lost the thread of what she was saying. Trying not to fidget, she allowed her gaze to wander round the room. If it had been roped off, she thought, it could easily have been a room in an ‘Ideal Home’ exhibition, on show to visitors with catalogues in their hands. The silver on the sideboard gleamed, and a bunch of garden flowers in a cut-glass vase had their stems trimmed to a uniform length. Everything that could be stood on a mat did stand on a mat, all exquisitely embroidered in Mrs Turner’s satin-stitch and drawn-thread work.
Sally blinked suddenly as Edna leapt up from the sofa, presenting the flat planes of her face to the ceiling, clasping her hands together in supplication.
‘Oh, my God! That’s the sirens going! I haven’t got the thermos flask ready, with you sitting talking your head off.’
Leaving Sally bewildered, not knowing quite what to do, Edna rushed from the room.
‘Mrs Turner?’ She followed her into the hall, through the breakfast-room and into a scullery at the back of the house. ‘Mrs Turner? Won’t you come down the road to my house?’ Sally winced as an enormous flash of light penetrated a chink in the black-out curtain draped across the window. ‘I’ll have to go now or my father will be out looking for me, but please, won’t you come? I … I don’t like leaving you here on your own.’
Edna thumped the kettle down on a gas-ring and took a stone hot-water bottle from a shelf, unscrewing the top with quick decisive twists of her sinewy fingers.
‘You made my son cry the night you went out with him.’
Her black eyes glittering, the stone bottle clutched to her flat chest, Edna rounded on Sally in a sudden and terrifying fury. ‘My David went back upset because of you, and if he’d been shot down it would have been on account of you. He was brave enough to go flying night after night over Germany. Yet you made him cry.’
Sally’s heart gave a great thud. Switching off the light and pulling back the curtain she saw to her amazement that Mrs Turner’s back garden and the stretch of allotments beyond were bathed in a bright light. When Edna Turner immediately switched on the light again she dropped the curtain into place and tried to pull the stiff resisting little figure towards the door.
‘Mrs Turner! They’ve dropped a huge flare! You can see for miles around! Please! Go inside your shelter if you won’t come back with me.’ She glanced round at the kettle coming to a boil. ‘I’ll turn the gas and the water off – they’re the same as in our house, so I know how. Please get into your shelter. Please …’
As Edna whipped round, the heavy stone bottle smashed to the floor, missing her feet by a few inches. Sally stared in horror at the white face, the working mouth, the bobbing head. It was like the nightmare she often had where angry mouths opened and closed silently, the distorted faces showing their contempt of her lack of understanding.
Now Mrs Turner was holding out both her arms so that her body formed the shape of a cross. The kitchen seemed to rock and sway, the floor tilting as cups and saucers slid from their places on the dresser.
‘Get out of my sight!’ she shouted. ‘Go! Just go!’
With sharp hurting jabs to Sally’s shoulder, she pushed her bodily down the hall to the front door which she opened with a wrench that almost tore it from its hinges.
‘Get in the shelter, Mrs Turner!’ Sally turned to see the little woman waving an arm eastwards to where the sky glowed red like a blood orange.
‘Bloody Germans!’ Edna’s voice was a clarion call. ‘I spit on your faces, the lot of you!’ She went inside, slamming the door with such force that the brass knocker did a little dance of protest against the polished oak graining.
Sally ran down the road, her heels clicking like knitting needles on the pavement, dry now after the May shower of heavy rain.
When she opened her own front door, the coats hanging untidily on the hall-stand and the dead flowers on the hall table looked warm and welcoming. She was reaching to hang up her coat when she was suddenly twisted round and held against a khaki uniform.
‘John! Oh, John!’
The next minute she was swung up into her brother’s arms, her feet clearing the floor. John Barnes grinned, then as suddenly was serious.
‘Where the hell have you been, our kid? It’s raining bombs out there, you little pillock. No wonder you look scared to death.’
In an instant Mrs Turner and her strange behaviour were forgotten, as brother and sister grinned at each other with genuine affection. John jerked his head towards the living-room. ‘Come and see who I’ve got in there. Okay?’
When he opened the door he pushed Sally in front of him, saying: ‘Thank God she’s come home. She shouldn’t be out on her own.’
‘Hello there, Sally.’
The girl sitting on the sofa smiled, her green eyes glinting with amusement, then she turned her head to one side. ‘But the “all clear’s” going, Johnnie. Besides, they were miles away.’
‘Hello, Christine.’ Sally hoped she wasn’t looking as surprised as she felt. John’s infatuation for Christine Duckworth, daughter of Amos, Sally’s boss, had been a family joke for a long time. Her eyes widened as the beautiful auburn-haired girl put out a hand to draw John down to sit beside her.
Sally backed slowly away as their lips met in a long, searching kiss. They knew she was standing there, yet it was as though she had said a magic word and disappeared in a whiff of blue smoke. Embarrassment held her still, then as John surfaced for a moment Sally backed away.
‘Nice to see you, Christine,’ she said foolishly, before slipping through the door into the hall in time to see Stanley coming in wearing his Home Guard uniform.
‘In here, love.’ Stanley led the way into the seldom-used front room. ‘Still at it in there, are they?’ He sat down by the empty gra
te and took out his pipe and tobacco pouch. ‘They came as soon as you’d gone out.’ He pressed the tobacco down with a practised thumb. ‘John’s on embarkation leave, twenty-four hours, that’s all, so I suppose he’s making up for lost time.’
The room smelled of damp and the possibility of mice. On the hardly ever played piano an empty vase stood next to a photograph of John in his sergeant’s uniform. Just before the war a new fireplace had been installed, pale green tiles with a tiny ledge for a mantelpiece. On the wall above, a mirror with scalloped edges hung from a gold chain. Sally saw the frown line in the space between her eyebrows and rubbed it with the cushion of her thumb.
‘Where do you think they’ll be sending him? The Middle East?’
When Stanley nodded, she sat down on an armchair with an ash-tray taped to its arm on a leather thong. ‘I suppose we were a bit silly thinking he’d be kept in this country for much longer.’ She sighed. ‘I’ll be glad when today’s over and done with. My mind’s been working like an ancient typewriter with the keys coming up and jamming when I try to think straight. I can’t take it in about John properly, either about him being serious with Christine Duckworth, or him going overseas. When I was with Mrs Turner I don’t think I helped. Well, I know I didn’t. She’s going potty, really round the twist, and I left her there.’ She smiled ruefully. ‘Well, the truth is she shoved me out of the house, then yelled and shook her fist at the sky.’
‘We’re going now. I’m taking Christine home.’
Sally stopped speaking as she saw Stanley look towards the door. John was grinning, his hair tousled, his face as flushed as if he’d been sitting too long in the sun. ‘Tell Mum I’m sorry I missed her but not to wait up. I’ll see her in the morning before I go. Ta’ra then. Ta’ra.’
‘His mother will give him “ta’ra then” when she comes in and finds she’s missed him.’ Stanley headed for the living-room and his own chair, but first he turned and touched Sally gently on her wrist. ‘Don’t worry too much about Mrs Turner, love. She’s insulted more folks who were only trying to help her than you’ve had hot dinners. She’s not going to do away with herself, if that’s what you’re thinking. Your mother reckons that shelter in the front room is more than half full with tins of pilchards!’
