Family Pride

by Family Pride (retail) (epub)

  Two of her regular shops had been bombed out of their premises and a third had closed their doors and moved from the centre of the town. It was like beginning all over again, trying new shops, having to plead with the buyers to even look at what she offered. On that first day she succeeded in selling only a dozen belts and six hat ornaments, and even these customers seemed less than enthusiastic at the prospect of a second visit.

  Her one and only pair of smart shoes were in urgent need of repair and the pavements hurt her feet. Her mother was due for another visit from the doctor and that was a bill they simply had to afford. She stopped to look in a shop window where jobs were advertised. She had to earn some money but, if she couldn’t prove that she was needed at home to care for her mother, and that she ran a business unaided, she would be shuffled off into war work, either the land army or into a munitions factory. Perhaps she could work at both? Find work in a local factory and develop the business? She had managed it before working for the Slades.

  There was a vacancy for a cleaner in a boarding house and with deep misgivings, she took out her notebook and wrote down the number. At least she wouldn’t be chased around by Slimy Slade!

  Tonight she was meeting Teifion, she reminded herself to lighten her mood. But first she had to go home and wash out her blouse ready for the next day, dry it on a rack near the primus stove which was all they had to both heat the room and do what cooking they could afford if the kitchen below was occupied. It was all so hopeless. She crumpled her notebook in her hand. Dreams of a business of her own were fine, but medicine and food for her mother and herself was more important.

  It was less than three weeks for Christmas. If only she had thought of that earlier she might have benefited from the season of increased sales. Taking a different route home she paused to look at the window display in a department store where she had frequently tried to make a sale and had been firmly refused. The main window was filled with dance-dresses and shawls and pretty satin shoes.

  On impulse she went inside and with a confidence she didn’t really feel, called importantly for the accessories buyer.

  To her relief the woman who came forward was someone she had never seen. Quickly, and with an air of doing the woman a favour, she opened her case on the glass counter and introduced herself.

  “I don’t think we’ve met. I have suddenly been able to increase the number of places to which I sell,” she said, her voice loud and assured, opening folder after folder of the beautiful hand-work. “These are just a few of my most elegant lines. If there is something you require that you don’t see, I can arrange delivery in a matter of days.”

  Lucy wore a silver-grey blouse and a sage-green skirt and against the skirt she displayed a silver belt, one of the items that continued to sell. As the woman admired its quality, Lucy opened one of the compartments and took out a few hat ornaments which she showed against her own turban-style hat of a darker green edged with silver.

  “These are beautiful, are they made locally?” the buyer asked, handling the merchandise like precious jewellery.

  “The designs are my own of course, Lucy Designs. My workers are the very best.”

  “That I can see.” The buyer replaced the items in the case and asked, “Would you be kind enough to wait one moment, I must fetch our Mr Standish.” She hurried away on silent feet, the lush carpet deadening the sound of her high heels and returned almost immediately with a tall, elderly, distinguished man wearing glasses which he lifted to look at the crotchet-work with hardly a nod of acknowledgement to Lucy. Backing away, he muttered something to the buyer and disappeared without addressing a word to Lucy.

  “We will buy what you have here.” The buyer was slightly flushed with excitement. “It will be displayed in the window immediately. The party season, isn’t it? In spite of the war.”

  Trying not to show her excitement, Lucy wrote down the items and totalled them up in her neat hand-writing and offered the account for payment.

  “Oh, I – we don’t usually pay until the end of the month,” the woman said looking flustered.

  Taking a deep breath, crossing her fingers out of sight of the woman’s anxious eyes, Lucy shook her head. “I really am most dreadfully sorry, but in these days, with businesses closing and things changing overnight as it were,” she paused, giving the woman a chance to consider the threat of bombing that Lucy had referred to but had not actually put into words. “I really cannot offer credit even for a company like this. My girls have to be paid, you see.” With her heart thumping, threatening to explode, she began to re-pack the case.

  “Just one moment, please Miss – er – Miss Lucy. I’m sure if I explain to our Mr Standish…”

  Ten minutes later Lucy was flying home, the empty case swinging beside her, dreaming of a good meal, the first for days, and imagining telling her mother the good news. A meal, an evening out with Teifion. Suddenly life was good. Temporarily good, maybe, but still very, very, good.

  * * *

  Gilly and Paul walked from Cardiff station and headed for the theatre. The crowds on the pavements walked in a desultory fashion, and Gilly was content to follow at the same pace, in no hurry to reach their destination. There was something magical about walking in the darkness with Paul. Occasionally he would take her arm to guide her and the touch and the smile as he looked down at her was a dream come true.

  “We can take a short cut through here,” he said, and they left the road and the patter of feet and the low rumble of slow, blacked out buses and cars and stepped into even greater darkness of a short alleyway. “I bought you this, a late birthday present,” he said, pushing a small box into her hands. “Best you open it when we get inside.”

  She stopped as her hands grasped it and felt the crinkly paper it was wrapped in, and he stumbled against her.

  “Thank you, Paul.” Looking up at him, his face only a blur in the night, she moved only slightly as if to thank him with the usual peck on the cheek and in moments she was in his arms, his strength pressing her against his lean body so her own jumped with a sensation that overwhelmed her. It was as if her secret parts were pulled on strings towards her heart, her body longed for his in a way that was new and exciting and unbelievably urgent. Mam had told her she mustn’t, but she hadn’t said how much she’d want to, she thought stupidly.

  They looked at each other shyly when they eventually reached the inside of the theatre and there were lights to show their wide-eyed expressions.

  Inside the tissue paper filled box, Gilly found a beautifully made crotcheted flower brooch and she offered it to Paul to fix on her coat.

  “Mam didn’t choose it, I did,” he told her. “I saw it in a window this afternoon when I came in on an errand for Dad. D’you like it, Gilly?”

  “I love it,” she breathed against his cheek. And I love you, too, she thought, and wondered if she would ever say those words aloud.

  Chapter Seven

  “What’s this about opening half the shop as a café, Gilly?” Granfer asked.

  “Who told you?” she demanded. If Mam told him it would be a very different tale than if he’d been told by Auntie Bessie.

  “Gerry,” he surprised her by saying. “He seems to think it’s a good idea and one that’ll work in well with the bakery.”

  “It was only a thought, Granfer. I told Auntie Shirley and she said, why not do it. It frightened me a bit, the thought of really doing it and not just thinking about it.”

  It was after midnight and they were sitting in the snug behind the bake-house, the heat from the ovens, almost unbearable during the day, was pleasant and more than sufficient to keep the worst of the night’s chill from them. At night, on the occasions when a droning plane or the shout of a warden telling someone to “put that light out” disturbed her, Gilly would often tip-toe along the landing and see if Granfer was awake, too. Quite often, like tonight, he would be awake and waiting for her to come.

  Careful not to disturb the rest of the household, they would
slip quietly along the passages and landings, down the cold stairs and into the room behind the bake-house, where Granfer kept his memories.

  “Gilly, if you want something, don’t waste time waiting for a miracle to happen to start things on their way. Life trips past so quick you sometimes wonder if it’s all a joke and you’ll wake up out of a dream in your bed and still be seventeen. I’ve heard it said that old people coming to the end of their lives regret not their mistakes but the things they didn’t try.”

  He looked at her, young, very beautiful and full of hope and he smiled, touching her softly curling hair affectionately. She was so like his wife had been at that age. “If an adventure is offered, follow its beckoning finger, Gilly. I wish I had. D’you know, I’ve left this town only once, and that was to go to Cardiff. Damn me, there’s daft, to spend your time on this earth and never see more than a couple of streets following the backside of a horse!”

  “What did you want to do, Granfer?” she asked softly. She loved his reminiscences and was half afraid to question him for fear of breaking his mood.

  “I used to imagine coming home from some far off place, like your uncles will soon – please God – and enthrall you all with my tales.”

  “Haven’t you been happy here with us, then?”

  “That’s been the trouble, lovely girl. I’ve been too happy.”

  “I don’t call that a waste of a life, Granfer.”

  He turned to look at her in the wavering flame of the candle, the skin on his small face paper white, his eyes an intense blue. “A wise and clever girl you are, young Gilly, and you’re right. What better way to have spent these years than loving your Gran, being proud of my family, then watching you grow up?”

  The kettle on the small camping stove began to hum and Gilly stood up to make their usual cup of cocoa. She changed the conversation from one that was making him sad and asked instead about running a business.

  “Treat a business like a pampered child for the first two years and after that it will start treating you like a much loved Mam,” he said.

  Taking out some accounts books from a cubby hole in the wall, he patiently showed her how his books were set out. They talked long into the night, longer than usual, and it was he who insisted it was time for them to sleep, before Dai Smoky found them when he came to “wake up the ovens” for the first baking.

  “You’ll do it, then?” he whispered as they stopped for a rest on the top landing.

  “Perhaps, when I’m bigger.”

  “Damn me, you’re bigger than me now! How much bigger d’you have to get to sell a few scones to gossiping old women? As big as your Uncle Sam? Imagine that. What a sight that would be, Uncle Sam with a frock on!”

  “When I’m older, then! Don’t make me laugh, Granfer,” she pleaded, tight-lipped with the effort of holding back a chuckle. “I’ll wake Mam and then we’ll both get a lambasting!”

  When she had lifted the old man back into bed and waited until he had settled into sleep, she lay on her own bed thinking about the café idea. Now she was used to cooking for the family, and had picked up ways of overcoming the difficulties of rationing, she had time on her hands. She imagined the small round tables, neat and filled with her food and cups of tea set out in pretty china. There was one table in the shop already and another in the bake-house that would benefit from a good polishing. The second hand shop on the corner would surely have a few chairs. She could make gingham cushions for them with table cloths to match. She finally slept seeing her half of the shop crowded with chattering women holding out their money for yet another of her famous scones; “More, more, more.”

  “Gilly! How many more times? I’m not calling you any more!” Her mother’s voice broke into the dream, her mother’s hands pulled back the curtains and reminded her that it was morning and time to find enough fat to fry a bit of bread and the black-pudding the butcher had let them have the day before.

  It was the day, too, when she and Paul were going into Cardiff again. Paul had suggested a theatre and she had agreed, tempted by the warm, intimate darkness.

  Defying her mother’s look of disapproval, Gilly put a smear of Auntie Shirley’s lipstick on as a final touch when she got ready to meet Paul. They had arranged to meet at the railway station for the train that left at six o’clock. She wore her new coat, a scarf Paul’s mother had given her, and the silk stockings held up by the suspender belt. The feel of them on her legs was no longer strange but sensual, flattering. She felt the last vestige of her school-girl appearance slipping away from her.

  Paul was dressed in a navy suit over which he wore a grey mac. He was a little taller than herself and equally thin, his wrists sticking out beyond the jacket sleeves, the trousers slightly short, showing the recent lengthening of his limbs. Over his arm was an umbrella and in his hands he carried a grey trilby. He smiled a little self-consciously as he put it on after greeting her.

  “You look nice,” he said. She thanked him and wondered if she could say that he did, too, or whether that would sound too cissy for a man. Luckily the train began to fuss its way into the station and there was no prolonged silence to make a reply necessary.

  The carriage they entered was full, but Paul managed to get her a seat and he stood near her in the corridor, popping his head around the corner occasionally to make some comment. She looked above the opposite seats at the sepia photographs of famous seaside places. They made her think of Granfer and his lack of adventures. Perhaps she would do some travelling for him and come back and enthrall him with her tales. The thought made her smile and Paul leaned into the compartment again and asked what was the joke.

  With his head bent near her own, smelling sweetly of soap and the gell with which he had attempted to control his thick hair, she whispered a brief account of her recent conversation and told him of the habit of nightly meetings with Granfer and going with him down into the snug.

  “You don’t think it’s harming him, do you, Paul?” she asked. “He’s very tired when we’ve climbed back up the stairs and he sleeps most of the morning after.”

  “I think it’s a small compensation for his lack of adventures,” he smiled. “You’re probably doing him more good than the doctor’s rules and restrictions.”

  The Cardiff streets were very dark, with the shops closed and the traffic crawling along, head-lamps wearing shields as well as being almost covered with black paper for fear of giving away the presence of a town to the enemy planes that flew over almost nightly.

  The air-raid siren went almost as soon as they had been shown to their seats in the theatre and with a groan they stood up and prepared to vacate the building, but before they had reached the doors, shuffling with the rest of the patrons, the All Clear sounded and they were shown back to their seats again.

  “You look nice, Gilly. Mam thinks you are growing into a fashion-conscious young lady.”

  “Does she!”

  “I heard her telling Dad the other evening.”

  “I could never be as beautiful as your Mam.”

  “You’re different from your Mam and your Auntie Bessie, you’ll have different ideas and standards I expect.”

  “I admire your Mam and want to please her,” she admitted. “I think she’s lovely.”

  “So do I and I have a problem,” he confided as they sat in the quiet of the boarded up café where they were having a cup of tea before catching the train home. “I have to leave home. And she’s broken hearted, I know she is, but I have to go.”

  “Go where?” Her blood seemed to chill as she looked at him, waiting for his reply.

  “I’m leaving college next Easter.”

  “To work full time for your father?” she frowned. “But why does that mean leaving home?”

  “No. I don’t want to follow Dad into the bakery, although I haven’t had the nerve to tell him yet. He dreams of having a son to take over as he took over from his father, but that life isn’t for me. Worthy it might be, but I couldn’t face the same th
ing day after day without a change of pace or an occasional challenge.”

  “What d’you want to do?” She held her breath, dreading to hear that he was going far away to follow some fancy career.

  “I haven’t really decided. Perhaps to teach. But with the threat of the call-up and the war set to continue, I think I’ll take time out – then I’ll join up.”

  “Before you have to? But why?” Why was he going to ruin everything? Her face showed her disappointment, she felt his words were a rejection of herself.

  “Rather than have it hanging over me, counting the days until the call-up papers come, I want to go and face it. Then I’ll come back and re-start my life. I don’t know how yet, but it will be as I want it. The break will give Dad a chance to accept the disappointment. You’re different from your parents, Gilly, and I’m different from mine. Dad’ll have to find someone else to help him if I’ve gone, won’t he? Perhaps the idea of my doing something different will be easier for him if I have to go away as soon as the summer.”

  “I’ll miss you,” she said.

  “Perhaps you’ll write? I should think a letter from home will be the highlight of the week. Will you? Write to me and tell me all the news?”

  “Of course. And I expect your Mam will be keeping the letters coming, too.” She looked up at him, he looked suddenly older in the low light of the now busy café. “Have you told her you’re joining up as soon as Easter?”

  “Yes.” He smiled and touched her hands with his own. “Gilly, I think that’s why she arranged for us to have that night out together near your birthday. I think she was hoping you’ll make me change my mind and want to stay.”

  “Oh. Then it was something that was forced on you. It wasn’t your choice.” She pushed back her chair, wanting to go, not wishing to hear any more of her hopes destroyed.