At the Break of Day

by Margaret Graham

  The quarry was fenced off in the war, Jack said, used for ‘something ’ush ’ush’ the old men had said. He told her about the cows he had to milk, the udders he had to wash, the apples he had to pick. How he had stayed down there to work on the farm when he was fourteen, rather than come back to the V1 and V2 raids, but really because he didn’t want to leave the country.

  He told her about the hams that had hung from the ceiling, the blackberries he and the other lads picked down by the fields which were joined to the next village by a long path.

  He told her how Maisie had come down and how they had laughed with the farmer and his wife over thick fat bacon and pints of cider. How Ollie had come too, released from his job building airforce huts for a weekend. How they had herded in the cows for milking. How he had shown his dad the pigs he was rearing, how Ollie had kissed him when he left, and Maisie too. They had been happy then.

  He told her about the Blitz and how he had worried, though he had never written about this in his letters to her. How he had thought of his mum and dad beneath rubble, burned, suffocated, but they had never been hurt, not so you could see anyway, he said.

  He rolled over then, pulled at a shoot of grass, chewed the end, spat it out. He told her of the GIs who had come and pitched their tents opposite one of the village pubs and further up too, opposite the blackberry bushes. How they had danced each week at the social club, how they had made friends. And he told her of big Ed who reminded him of his mother because of his laugh and his hair.

  ‘He gave me candy,’ he said to Rosie, lying on his back now, his arm over his eyes. ‘He sort of adopted me. He was good, and kind, and clumsy. He’d meet me on the green. I’d lend him me bike to go to the village across the main road for the bigger dances. That was where Norah lived.’

  ‘Do you miss him?’

  ‘Yes I do. We laughed a lot. Those GIs were good to us kids. Really good, they took us under their wings a bit, one to one. They were warm and friendly, not like us. D’you know what I mean?’

  Yes, she thought. She did know, because that is what her American family were like. Then Rosie told him about Frank and Nancy because they, too, had taken her under their wing. She had not seen her real family for six years and so they had become unreal, too distant, too different. She told him about her pain, but he already knew, he said. She told him about the lake, and about Sandra. But she did not tell him about Joe.

  She told him how she would not pledge allegiance to the flag as she was supposed to each morning before the start of school. She told him about the barbecues, and about Uncle Bob – of the jazz and the long shadows across the sloping lawn.

  Then Grandpa called from the stream and she took Lee, dipping him in and out of the water because Ollie and Maisie were talking to one another at last.

  Jack felt the sun on his face and he thought of his own pain. He remembered how Maisie had come again and again to Somerset, how she had laughed when she met Ed, how she had popped out when Jack was asleep and he was glad that she did because the war was long and dirty for her in London.

  He looked across at Rosie, at her legs, which were tanned as his were not. Tanned and strong, she lifted her skirts higher as the water rippled around her. She was pretty, not really changed. She reminded him of Ed, the way she spoke, and it warmed him. He had trusted Ed, liked him.

  He looked across at his father. He loved him, too, he knew he did, but he didn’t know this dark, fierce man that Ollie had become. He didn’t know this father who wouldn’t throw Lee up in the air, or blow on his stomach to make him laugh as he had made Jack laugh. No, he didn’t know him at all and he didn’t like him. Jack sank back on the blanket. His father had taken the laugh from his mother’s face and didn’t love their baby. Is that what the war did to you?

  Rosie was calling him now and he pushed himself to his feet.

  ‘Go on, son,’ called his dad. ‘I bet she splashes you.’

  Jack laughed then because his dad looked like he used to and sounded like he used to and he hoped it would last so that the anger, confusion and pain which swept through him and frightened him would go.

  The sun kept shining and the hops were brought in and neither Jack nor Rosie wanted the weeks to end. They walked to the shop pushing Lee and bought him liquorice shoelaces. They all sat outside the pub with the Welsh and the Black Country people and watched the gypsies running their ponies up and down. They drank ginger beer and cider while one old gypsy bought a pony ‘With All Faults’.

  They paid the sixpence deposit on the glasses just to sit outside in the last of the sun, and talked again of Somerset and America and watched as Ollie and Maisie sang ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ after three glasses of beer and Grandpa asked, ‘Will you have another drink, me dooks?’

  They sat round the fire on the third Sunday night and listened as Grandpa told them, as he always used to, how the nailers would put their babies on the bellows to rock them to sleep. How he had been bellow-rocked by his parents, and had then pumped the bellows when he was a bit older than Lee, standing on a box. How he had learned to have the irons in the fire ready for his father as he finished one batch of nails, so that a few seconds could be saved on each nail and a few more pennies earned from the middleman.

  He told them how some children had stood in the roof with their backs against a beam and pumped the bellows with their feet. He looked at his hands as Jack put more wood on the fire and told how he had grown tall enough to work at the nail bench. How he had made his first good nail. How he was given a penny dated for that year.

  He told them how one boy had not wanted to work. How he had been nailed by the ear to the doorpost and left until he promised he would work.

  Rosie held his hands but Norah just looked bored.

  That night Rosie wrote to Frank and Nancy, telling them that she was living in a pigsty, and about the smell of hops on her hands, and the feel of the water about her legs in the stream, telling them that she was happy. And she was. She still missed them, but she was happy. She had been taken back to her childhood, reminded of so much, and, yes, now she had found her English family again.

  As the last week drew to a close, all the pickers dragged down the longest bines from the end of the rows and Rosie picked up the hop-dog caterpillars which fell out and carefully laid them to one side.

  ‘They’ll turn into moths, you know,’ Jack teased.

  ‘I know but I guess I can handle it.’

  They carted the bines to the oast-houses, the largest of which had been scrubbed and swept that afternoon. Jack and the rest of the boys stood on ladders and draped the bines, because tonight there would be a dance. There was always a dance.

  Everyone came, and the band played jazz for half an hour and Jack told Rosie how much he liked it too, but his favourite was Duke Ellington, not Bix Beiderbecke, and then the band played swing and jive and they danced in the heat, their bodies touching and then away again. And always there was the smell of the hops. Norah danced with a Welsh boy. Their bodies did not touch but she smiled, and that was good.

  Rosie went outside, sat with Grandpa and drank cider while he had a beer. Maisie and Ollie drank too, and laughed and then Maisie pulled out her cigarettes and Grandpa took one, and Ollie too. Then he stopped, his hand too tight on her arm. His face was hard and Rosie looked at Maisie, at the tension on her face. Now Jack was there, leaning over, trying to take his father’s hand from his mother’s arm.

  ‘Where did you get those bloody Yank fags?’ Ollie shouted and those about them looked. Lee was in his chair and he was crying now.

  Maisie winced at the tightening grip. People closed in and now the band were playing ‘I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas’. In goddamn September, Rosie thought, even as she moved closer to Maisie, pulling at Ollie’s arm, wanting them all to be safe again, as they had been just a moment ago.

  ‘I gave them to her,’ Rosie said. ‘I brought them back from America, don’t you remember?’

  It was over then, over as tho
ugh it had never been, and Jack took her back into the dance and the heat. The music was slow as Jack took her in his arms.

  It was too hot but it didn’t matter, he was with her, touching her, and she almost felt safe again but she could still see Ollie’s anger and Maisie’s fear. She didn’t tell Jack that she had given Maisie Camels, not Lucky Strikes.

  Jack was leading her out now, into the dark cool air, away from the music and the people, and they stood down at the gate again, feeling their carved initials with their fingers, seeing the wild hops winding round the hedge and the telegraph pole, seeing the lights from the farm, hearing the owl in the distance, the music from the oast-house. It was now that he kissed her, with soft, gentle lips, and it was as though she had known this feeling of warmth and safety all her life because his tongue did not intrude into her mouth, nor his hands move to her breast, and his skin had the smell of the boy she had grown up with.

  She kissed him back, holding his head in her hands, wondering at the children they had once been, and the people they had become, and it seemed that their friendship had become something stronger. Something good. Yes, she was home at last, safe at last, and the cigarettes meant nothing.

  CHAPTER 5

  On their return Mrs Eaves had assigned them to different counters. Rosie didn’t mind. She stacked the notebooks, laid out the pencils, the few sharpeners clutched inside the tiny globes. She looked at America. So large. And at Britain. So small. And as Glenn Miller played ‘The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B’ she thought of Nancy and Frank, of Sandra and Joe, and it didn’t hurt so much, because she had spent September in the soft warm hills with Jack and was at her evening classes twice a week.

  Norah minded though. She had been put on haberdashery and measured out quarter-inch baby ribbon, cord, and tape and added up on a pad, her face set, her voice sharp.

  At home she sat nearest to the fire, her stockings rolled down round her ankles, her slippers trodden down beneath her heels, and would not talk of hop-picking, or the sun which had turned their skin brown, or the stream which had lapped at their legs, because if they hadn’t been there she would still be on jewellery.

  Rosie and Grandpa talked though, long into the night, and his skin was tanned too, his eyes bright again. They talked of the bines which floated like seaweed in the evening breeze, of the gypsies who danced on that last night as though they were part of the earth and sky. They talked of Maisie and Ollie whom they often heard laughing in the yard now, of Lee who was tossed into the air, Ollie’s hands strong around his waist. They talked and they laughed but Grandpa did not discuss Jack, he just took her hand one night, and said, ‘I’m glad you’ve found your friend again. Sixteen is difficult, it’s half child, half adult. You need someone you can trust.’

  Rosie told Jack as they walked to the Palais, Sam and Ted behind them, and Jack nodded. ‘Yes, that’s it. It’s the trust.’

  Jack came dancing with them every night now, because Ollie wasn’t drinking and shouting and sleeping. He was working on the stall, selling nylons out of a suitcase, his finger to his nose if he was asked what else.

  On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays the gang went dancing, slipping 1/6d on to the pay desk, making for a table at the edge of the floor. Sam and Ted looked at the girls who clustered down one side, deciding, choosing. Then they danced beneath a great glass revolving chandelier while the band played swing and jive, but never jazz. They coasted around the MC who stood in the middle of the dance floor, checking that no one kissed, that they all danced in the same direction, that they did not jitterbug.

  Few kissed. All went in the right direction. All of them jitterbugged and her hand didn’t sweat in Jack’s and she could smell his skin as he swung her close, and then away.

  They drank warm ginger beer mixed with cider and it brought back the buzz of the hoverflies in amongst the bines, the smell of the hops on her hands, the sun which washed her past back into her bones.

  They walked home, dropping Sam and Ted, standing in the alley at the bottom of their yards. They stood looking at the light thrown out across the roses, looking at the shed rotting in the left-hand corner, looking at one another.

  He would kiss her, gently, lightly, squeeze her hand and then leave her, walking in through his gate, she through hers. She would hear his steps in time with hers, and it was only with the closing of the door that the sound of him left her, but the knowledge of his presence in the bedroom next to her wall kept him close.

  Tuesdays and Thursdays she went to Miss Paul’s above the piano shop and typed to Chopin, chasing the notes, rubbing out the errors, blowing the rubber dust from the keys, cursing inside her head because Jack was watching Jane Russell at the Odeon whilst she was here.

  But each week she was faster and her shorthand was better, and she wrote to Frank and Nancy that next spring she would find a job in Fleet Street. Just you wait and see, she wrote, and she knew that her letter was strong and positive, and that they would be glad.

  By the middle of October she was moved back to records and played Duke Ellington for Jack and he touched her face when he walked in and heard. He stood still, listening to the piano as it beat its rhythm.

  Norah was on spectacles and would stand waiting while customers read the printed card with the letters that diminished in size. Her nails clicked on the metal frames that she held in her hand while she waited, her face long as she fitted them around strange ears.

  Rosie played ‘I’ll Be Seeing You’, and smiled across as Norah scowled, but then regretted that she had done it, because the bridge between them had not yet been rebuilt.

  October became November, and though there was still grief in the quiet hours of the night, she no longer kept her bedroom door open. There was hope, there was fun, there was Jack.

  They danced and they kissed but still lightly, gently, and his hands didn’t slide beneath her blouse nor his tongue probe her mouth and she was glad. She didn’t tell him about Joe though, even when he told her of the girlfriend he had had in Somerset, the one he had kissed in the apple orchard. She said instead that it was only another five months until her exams and that she must work until midnight again.

  She said this too when she wrote to Frank and Nancy but she also told them of the rationing, and the wind which grew ever more cold. She told them how Maisie called over the fence every Sunday and passed bread and hot dripping and how she and Grandpa ate it on the bench, wrapped in scarves and coats.

  She told them how she, Jack and Ollie had helped Mrs Eaves’s sister move into an old Army barracks north of London along with two hundred other squatters. They had pushed an old barrow with some furniture down the road from the flat she shared with her son and his wife and three children – a flat which had only one bedroom.

  She told them how the people were taking over these empty buildings because there was nowhere else for them to live. How the Local Authorities were accepting them and connecting water and electricity, for what else could they do? There were no houses available. She told them that these were the things that she would write about when she started her proper job in the summer.

  Frank wrote back asking why Mrs Eaves’s sister hadn’t moved into one of the prefabs they had been hearing about. If she didn’t know, she should find out, get the complete picture, start thinking like a journalist.

  Rosie asked Grandpa as they sat in front of the coal fire while the rain teemed down as it had done for the last seven days. Jack had collected some wood from a flooded bomb site and this was stacked on its end to one side. There was a smell of wet dust from it which crept through the whole house, but it would make the coal last longer.

  ‘There aren’t enough. They’re having lotteries in some Local Authorities, though why anyone would queue to live in one of those I don’t know,’ said Grandpa, flicking the ash of a Woodbine into the fire. He coughed. The damp November air was making his chest thick again and his tan was fading, but he had had no accidents for months.

  ‘Well, I can,’
ground out Norah. ‘A nice clean bungalow with a neat garden, a nice sort of neighbour. A nice new town away from London’s mess. I’d want it.’

  Rosie looked round the room, at the books either side of the fireplace, the American oilcloth on the table, bought from Woolworths. She thought of the house by the lake, the house in Lower Falls, and knew now that all three were home. At last all three were home.

  As Christmas drew near she sewed cotton sheeting into two small pillowcases and filled them with hops, sending one to Frank and Nancy, hiding one for Grandpa. She bought a Duke Ellington record for Jack and Evening in Paris perfume for Maisie, Californian Poppy for Norah (because Norah needed all the sweetness she could get, she told Jack).

  She bought Ollie paint brushes because he was always talking of doing up the house, but there were so few materials available. She bought Nancy a Union Jack brooch which was left over from the war. It was luminous ‘so Frank will be able to track you down wherever you are’, she wrote as she put their card in with the parcel.

  She told them that her typing was still improving, the Palais was still fun. She did not tell them how Jack kissed her good night or that, as she crossed off the days to Christmas, her grief was deep and dark again because she remembered Lower Falls and the times they had spent together.

  Instead she sat by the fire with Grandpa on 20 December until ten p.m. colouring, cutting and sticking paper chains together as they had always done.

  ‘I’ve missed this,’ he said, his hands folding the strips slowly, holding the ends between thumb and finger while they stuck together. ‘I’ve missed our Christmases.’

  ‘So have I, Grandpa,’ she said. But she was not thinking of paper chains. She was thinking of the thick snow where here there was rain. Thick snow which had turned the world into a Christmas card as they had travelled by tram on her first American Christmas to the main shopping centres which were decorated with lights, and with streamers and garlands, snowmen and Father Christmas. The air had rung out with carols and there had been a Father Christmas on each floor, wilting in the central heating.