by Marie Joseph
‘We’re not starting something. That’s what I mean. David Turner stopping here now because of what’s happened could mean David Turner coming here for all his leaves. And that could mean you and him getting serious for no other reason than that you’ve been thrown together.’
‘Oh, Mum, that’s stupid!’
‘Is it?’ Josie gave a harsh laugh. ‘I wasn’t born the day before yesterday. There’s a war on, remember? He’ll be lucky if he comes through it, will David Turner. I’m not having you breaking your heart before you’ve even begun to live.’ Her eyes closed for a moment as she heard the sirens begin their moaning wail. ‘You’re only a child. Give yourself a chance, love.’
‘I’m older than you were when you got married.’ Sally blinked as her mother thumped the table hard with a clenched fist.
‘That’s just what I’m getting at, can’t you see? Your father was like David Turner, war weary, with his knee half shot away, an’ I saw myself like some flamin’ Florence Nightingale eager to cherish him and make him forget.’ Suddenly she slumped down onto a chair and buried her face in her hands. ‘I went no further in my imagination than that walk down the aisle.’
‘I can’t hear you, Mum.’
Josie took her hands away from her face. ‘And because my mother was dead set against it I wanted to get married more than ever.’
‘Your mother?’
‘Yes, my mother.’ Josie’s blue eyes narrowed. ‘Your grandma, Sally Barnes. The one who’s never mentioned. The grandma who was never quite sure who had fathered her daughter. The grandma who could barely write her name … It’s a funny thing, you know, but as I grow older I remember her more and more. Why is it you’ve never once asked me about her, Sally? Why do you and John act as though your mother never had a mother of her own?’ She blew a strand of bleached hair out of her eyes. ‘I’ll tell you why!’
Sally knew her mother was shouting by the way her throat was working. The sky outside was filled with the heavy sound of planes; the guns were thundering, but all Sally knew was that her mother was shouting at her across the width of the kitchen table.
‘I married out of my class, Sally, but then you know that, don’t you? Oh, aye, you could have heard tongues wagging from here to St Helens about that girl from Foundry Street marrying Stanley Barnes the telephone engineer who was so clever he could build a wireless from bloody scratch. Do you know, your father’s sisters never sent as much as a bunch of daisies when my mother died? That was soon after the wedding. They had a right field-day laughing at her that day because they thought her skirt was too short for their narrow Methody eyes. An’ when her hat blew off outside the Chapel they sniggered behind their kid gloves. I wanted to kill them. Do you know that?’
Sally patted the letter in her pocket then reached out across the table. ‘All that hasn’t anything to do with David Turner, has it?’ She took a deep breath. ‘It hasn’t anything to do with the bomb last night, or with John going away.’ Biting hard at her lip, she stared at the ceiling for a minute. ‘But it has to do with you crying when you came in last night, hasn’t it?’ She finished on a rush of words. ‘It’s about the soldier who’s been bringing you home from the dancing. Isn’t it?’
‘What did you say?’ Eyes and mouth wide open, Josie stared at her daughter. ‘Say that again!’
‘The soldier, Mum.’ Sally nodded her head up and down twice. ‘I’ve seen you with him. I got on the same tram once, and I saw you laughing with him, then I was looking through my window once when he brought you home.’ Her calm little colourless voice never faltered. ‘You’re worried sick to your stomach, aren’t you, Mum? You’re not going to have a baby, are you?’
‘Oh, my God! Oh, my sainted aunt! You sit there and ask your own mother a thing like that?’
‘He’s gone away then, hasn’t he?’ Sally was quietly insistent. ‘Was that why you were crying last night?’
‘Oh, my God!’ Josie said it again before her face crumpled. ‘Yes. He’s gone away.’ Her small chin lifted. ‘An’ I’ll never see him again.’
There was a small silence, then Sally said clearly: ‘Just because a person can’t hear, it doesn’t mean they can’t see or notice things. I understand a lot of things.’
‘You do?’
‘Oh, yes.’ Sally nodded again. ‘Dad doesn’t make you laugh, and he … the soldier did. But that doesn’t mean …’
She flinched as Josie grabbed her wrist, putting a finger to her lips in a warning gesture. ‘Your dad’s here.’
When Stanley’s neat head came round the door his eyes registered immediate relief that the morning’s fiasco was obviously over and done with. There they were, the two of them, chatting away as if all hell wasn’t being let loose over Liverpool.
Stanley’s smile changed to bewilderment as Sally suddenly rushed past him into the hall, bleak and sombre with its cardboard windows. As she ran upstairs she noticed that the last remaining Blue Willow plate had somehow dislodged itself and was lying in smithereens on the tread at the side of the narrow stair carpet.
‘What was all that about?’ Stanley walked over to the sink and began to wash his hands.
‘Search me. She’s at a funny age, that’s all.’ Josie shrugged.
‘The poor little devil doesn’t even know the sirens have gone.’
They buried Edna Turner on the Wednesday afternoon of the following week, on a day when the trees in the cemetery were heavy with bright green leaves.
David thought how fitting it was that his solitary, lonely mother was being sent to her eternal rest as quietly as she had lived. He only wished he could believe that the father he had never known was waiting for her with outstretched hands. Looking down, he frowned at the shiny toe-caps of his black shoes, then he raised his head to stare at Sally’s mother.
Josie had come to the funeral because Wednesday was early closing day, and because she could hardly refuse. She had tied a black chiffon scarf over her hair and coloured her lips the same shade of purple as her fitted coat. There was a letter in her handbag, first sent as arranged to Olive Marsden’s address, and the contents were churning her insides with excitement, worrying her to death at the same time.
Stanley was standing to attention, his thin face set in sober lines. He was thinking about the mysterious business of Hess, Hitler’s deputy, landing in Scotland. Goebbels was at the bottom of it, Stanley was convinced, but the newspapers were only telling half the truth, he was sure of that. He stole a glance at Sally, then sighed. Just lately her deafness seemed to be worse, if that was possible. Her face was wearing its shut-in look, and in her flowered summer dress with its short sleeves puffed at the top she looked about fourteen years old.
Early that morning David had stood in the road outside the ruins of his home. Already the bulldozers had chewed and vomited the rubble into a dune of gritty dust, and soon there would be daisies, pink campion and purple willow herb. Soon he would be going back on flying duties. Long before the willow herb poked its first green tendrils through the bricks he would be crouched over his instrument table plotting a course so that British bombs could destroy with equal violence.
‘Mad,’ he had muttered, to the consternation of a man on his way to an early shift. ‘We’re all mad, the bloody lot of us.’
‘Go on then,’ his mother had said, as he left for the station that last morning of his leave. ‘Go back to the war. You’re a man, and men only come into their own when they’re fighting each other.’
He had stretched out a hand to her, and she had startled him by covering it suddenly with both her own, holding it fast as if it were a butterfly she was keeping from flying away.
As soon as the short burial service was finished, he walked over to Sally’s parents, shook hands with them and thanked them for coming.
‘You’re sure you won’t come back with us? Just for a cup of tea?’ Stanley looked as uncomfortable as he felt, wishing his wife had made the invitation.
‘I hope it wasn’t too difficult ge
tting the time off this afternoon.’ David fell into step beside Sally, holding her elbow lightly as they stepped onto the gravel path.
‘I’m going straight back now, making the time up this evening.’ She was equally polite, equally shy. ‘David, I wish I could tell you how sorry I am … I wish there was something I could do.’
‘It hasn’t hit me yet.’ He was muttering, holding his head down, forgetting she wouldn’t be able to understand what he was saying. ‘At the moment I just feel that my mother was so sad, that dying for her could only be what they call a blessed relief.’ He felt the blood rush to his face. ‘I’m so angry, Sally. This morning I picked up a charred stick and poked about in the bricks and the dirt to see if I could salvage anything. My things, for Pete’s sake! They had dug my mother out of there and all I could think about were my records, my books, and my cricket bat with Ernest Tyldsley’s autograph on it. I wasn’t thinking about her, Sally. Just my piddling belongings.’
He turned to her, and Sally hoped her expression had been the right one. It was always the same when anyone confided in her with their head averted. Her grey eyes were steady as she stared into his flushed face.
‘You saw my mother that night?’ He bit hard at his lip. ‘How was she?’ He kicked at a loose stone. ‘Was she okay?’
‘She was fine, David,’ Sally lied. ‘She had filled her hot-water bottle, and we’d talked, mostly about your father. She mentioned him a lot.’
‘She blamed me for leaving her.’ David hesitated. ‘She thought I should have wangled my way back into civilian life on a reserved occupation. Now she’s shown me once and for all that I was somehow in the wrong leaving her all alone.’
‘Then you would have been killed, David!’ The words came out in a rush. ‘It was a direct hit. That’s a daft way to talk!’
‘Sally!’ They were nearing the main road now, and Josie and Stanley were waiting for them, standing slightly apart, like two strangers starting a queue. Turning his back on them, his face averted from Sally, forgetting once again in his distress that his words were wasted, David said: ‘I … that night after the pictures. Do you think we could forget it?’
‘Sally! The tram’s coming. Come on if you’re coming!’ Josie was waving an arm, and seeing it Sally hesitated, stepped back a pace, and the moment was lost. Colour flooded her rounded cheeks.
‘Thanks for the letter. I’ll write.’
‘Sally!’ Josie was waving frantically now as Stanley, with one foot on the boarding platform, shouted something to the conductor.
When Sally, holding onto the rail, turned her head she saw David standing there, tall, neat and correct in his uniform. The conductor rang the bell and the tram bore her away from him, a lonely figure standing seemingly to attention in the open space where the cemetery gates used to be.
‘So you’ve definitely got a Home Guard “do” on this weekend?’
Stanley twisted round on the tram’s slatted seat to stare at his wife. She never showed the slightest interest in his Home Guard activities. Right from the beginning when he had rushed to answer Anthony Eden’s broadcast the previous May, pleading for volunteers, she had appeared to find the whole concept hilarious.
‘A fat lot of use you’d be with your gammy leg.’
He remembered the way her eyes had sparkled with laughter, and the way he had answered her, his face stiff with hurt.
‘Military experience is rated more important than physical fitness. The official requirement is that men must be capable of free movement.’
‘Free movement? You couldn’t cock that leg of yours over a gas-tar bubble in the road! They’ll have to be desperate before they take you on.’
From that first day Stanley had gone conscientiously to report for duty, walking with his limping glide to drill hall or rifle range, first in a uniform consisting merely of an armband with the letters LDV on it, then in battle-dress with his corporal’s stripe sewn proudly into position. On the day Josie had found out he had been drafted to the Pigeon Corps, she had shouted with glee.
‘Oh, my God! If old Hitler finds out about you he’ll throw the bloody sponge in!’
Yet here she was now, her pale face framed in the black chiffon scarf, asking what appeared to be a caring question.
‘We have a big show on,’ he told her quietly. ‘We’re getting decent fire-arms now America is coming up trumps. A bit different from the beginning when some of our lot raided Belle Vue Zoo in Manchester for old Synder rifles.’
She nodded, as if with understanding. ‘You know Olive at the shop?’
Stanley blinked at the sudden change of subject. ‘I should do. You talk about her often enough.’
‘Well, she has an auntie at Morecambe, and this weekend Olive’s going to stay with her and she wants me to go with her.’ Josie lowered her head, biting at the purple lipstick. ‘I thought with you being out all weekend I might go.’ He saw with surprise that she was clenching her hands so tightly on the clasp of her handbag that the knuckles showed white. ‘I know I’ve been a bit snotty to you lately, with John going away and the bomb the other night.’ She shuddered. ‘An’ just now up the cemetery, when they lowered Edna Turner into her grave, I kept thinking how it could easily have been me – us. Stanley, I’m frightened. I know we’re supposed to keep cheerful, but I must be a bloody coward. I thought we were well away from the bombing where we live, but we’re not, are we?’
Stanley wanted to put an arm round her. If she would be like this more often, really talking to him instead of putting him down all the time, then things between them might be different. But he couldn’t put an arm round her, not on the tram; all he could do was try and comfort her.
‘The way I see it, love, is that we’re in a sort of no man’s land, with the heavy stuff going over our heads. It was like lightning striking the other night. You know it never strikes the same place twice.’
‘I’d like to get away for a short while.’ Josie pointed to a house, its windows empty of glass, its front door boarded over. ‘We’re travelling away from the docks and yet there’s a lot of houses like that one.’
‘But what about Sally?’ Stanley’s voice was tinged with doubt.
‘Good God! She’s not a child! I’d been married to you for two years when I was her age.’
‘But you weren’t …’
‘Deaf,’ Josie finished for him. ‘I know that, but can’t you see we’ve got to stop protecting her so much. She’s so … so innocent it bothers me. She doesn’t seem to know how to talk to boys. I was watching David Turner with her just before we got on the tram. She ran off, Stanley. She left him standing there with his mouth open. Just like a girl of fourteen would do.’
Stanley spoke out of the corner of his mouth, facing straight ahead.
‘She’s sitting right behind us, love. It seems cruel talking about her just because we know she can’t hear what we’re saying.’
But Josie was no longer listening to him. She would be able to square Olive before Saturday, and write to Bill to say she had managed to get away for the weekend. She closed her eyes against the sudden upsurge of excitement gripping her insides with cramp. For the first time she would lie in a bed with him, in his arms, for a whole night. She resisted the overwhelming temptation to shout her happiness aloud.
‘See, it’s clouding over. I thought that sunshine was too good to last,’ she said.
For something to say.
Three
CHRISTINE DUCKWORTH HAD NO qualms about claiming to be on war work. The two full days, plus the Saturday morning stint in her father’s office, bored her to distraction. She couldn’t make up her mind which was the most tedious – the hours spent at the dark green filing cabinets, or the time spent sitting at the switchboard passing callers through to the right departments.
Her voluntary work at the YMCA was beginning to be deadly monotonous, too. All those hands stretched out for mugs of tea, husbands, sweethearts, most of them newly joined up and homesick, wanting stamps, cigar
ettes and change for the telephones. Endless trays of sausages to be shoved in and out of the ovens. Rows upon rows, pricked and lined up. When this bloody awful war was over she vowed she would never look a sausage in the face again. When things got back to normal she would go back to her modelling job in Manchester, weaving between the tables in the restaurant of the big store wearing gorgeous clothes, little pill-box hats with eye veils, silk stockings, crêpe-de-Chine underskirts, and French knickers with lace. It was all hush-hush of course, but clothes rationing was bound to come in before long. Daddy had said so.
‘There’s a glut of machinists,’ he had said, ‘all better employed on munitions or making parachutes. It’s patriotic to look shabby at the moment, anyway. A good idea I reckon if they made Churchill’s siren suit the national dress till the war’s over.’
‘Oh, my God!’ Christine had closed her eyes at the thought of her five-foot-tall plump mother in a navy-blue siren suit, flanked by her bean-pole father in a thick khaki ditto. ‘Oh, my God!’
Christine was in one of her ‘Oh, my God!’ moods at the moment. Coming out into the street that wet Saturday lunchtime she looked up at the grey blanket of sky and shuddered. She unfurled her scarlet umbrella, stepped off the pavement and saw the airman leaning nonchalantly against the wall across the road. He was so wet she could see the rain dripping from the neb of his cap, and as she stared a sailor walked past and winked at her, his collar flapping upwards like a sail caught in a sea breeze.
Ignoring him she picked her way carefully over the flagstones. Lifting her head she smiled radiantly.
‘Can I help you at all?’
When she spoke to a man Christine’s voice automatically changed to a throaty murmur. She had a habit of lowering her green eyes, then raising them quickly. She could recognize even the smallest flicker of interest in a man’s eyes before he was aware of it himself, but this time she wasn’t too sure.
