Holidays at Home Omnibus

by Wait Till Summer; Swingboats On the Sand; Waiting for Yesterday; Day Trippers; Unwise Promises; Street Parties (retail) (epub)

  ‘Because of my girls. I do whatever is necessary to keep them fed, clothed and happy.’ Hannah spoke softly and stared at Lilly, allowing the words to sink in. ‘They are my responsibility, my joy, my life and I’ll do anything for them.’

  ‘Having parents who can afford to keep me makes all that noble stuff unnecessary,’ Lilly replied.

  ‘Until you develop some pride.’

  ‘Fat lot of pride in cleaning lavatories!’ she retorted as she flounced off.

  With Hannah’s words ringing in her head, Lilly went for a long walk, through the park, passing places where she and Phil had stopped to kiss, remembering how wonderful it had been. Overwhelming self-pity enveloped her. She hadn’t needed Hannah’s words to tell her how lazy she was. All her other friends had work, many of them in munitions factories or other work that contributed to the war effort. Even Auntie Audrey went around collecting money for National Savings and was a volunteer fire-watcher, besides running the big house where Granny Moll had lived all her married life.

  The baby wasn’t due until May. She could work through the winter, and suddenly she knew she wanted to. She had to put aside her easy acceptance of idleness, using the excuse that she was different, that it was her basic character. The question was, with the fish-and-chip shop shop still making her feel queasy, what could she do?

  It was the beach, the place she said she hated, that gave her employment. Two of the cafés remained open during the winter. They had small rooms which offered teas and snacks during the summer, but in the winter they made a reasonable living by opening the top room, which was enormous, for dances, tea dances and, on occasion, celebration dinners for various firms. Lilly went there and offered her services as waitress and occasional kitchen hand.

  The wages were small, but there was the promise of tips, which appealed. She would be so charming that the tips would give her baby all he or she needed. But she would have to avoid mention of that or she wouldn’t get the job in the first place!

  * * *

  Hannah loved Johnny Castle but she still had no illusions about him marrying her. Although he had declared his love for her and had told her he wanted them to marry, he had also said he wanted to delay the announcement in case people thought he was marrying her on the rebound from his broken engagement to Eirlys Price.

  Eirlys had been in London for almost a year and he still hadn’t made the announcement. With two children and him being so much younger, she had to settle for friendship. Johnny was a good friend. From the morning they had met outside the greengrocer when her paper carrier bag had collapsed and sent all her vegetables rolling down the street and he had stopped to help her, they had been friends.

  He had walked home with her to the house where she lived with her parents, using two rooms and with restricted use of the kitchen. He didn’t need any explanation of their attitude. Their disapproval showed on their faces and in the way they spoke to her and the little girls, their granddaughters. They were embarrassed and angry at having a daughter who was divorced and bringing up children without the father’s presence or help.

  ‘Shamed they are,’ she had told Johnny one day, when she had been forbidden to allow the girls to play in the garden. Johnny had asked her to explain.

  ‘I had a husband who refused to work,’ she began. ‘He spent most of his time in the snooker hall, or in friends’ houses playing cards. At other times, when he could find the money, he was in the pubs, or at dances, and…’ She hesitated before he nodded for her to tell him more. ‘There were other women, and he didn’t even try to hide them from me.’ She avoided telling him the full story of how he had hit her in drunken rages, and how her parents refused to support her.

  ‘When I sued for divorce, he forced himself on me one day and, well, the result was Josie. Another time, when he was really angry with me for the statement I’d made, he did it again and I had Marie. Born out of fear and anger they were, yet they’re the sweetest, gentlest of girls.’

  ‘Poor love,’ Johnny had said. ‘But I don’t understand why your parents aren’t more helpful. Surely they love their grand-daughters?’

  ‘They reckon they were born out of wedlock, as, officially, we were separated. So that makes me a loose woman. They don’t believe rape is possible between husband and wife, even in those circumstances.’

  Hannah thought of that terrible confession as she opened one of Johnny’s letters. In it, he asked whether the garden was still out of bounds. Holding the letter, she went through to the kitchen and asked her mother if the girls could play outside for a while before supper.

  Tight-lipped, her mother shook her head. ‘I don’t want you flaunting your shame for all the neighbours to see.’

  She wrote a cheerful letter to Johnny, ignoring his question and giving him details of a trip the three of them had made to see his father, followed by a fish-and-chip supper for herself and the girls, served by Beth. ‘Your father is so kind to me; I can’t tell you how much it means to be able to talk and laugh, without feeling ashamed of showing happiness,’ she wrote. Then she tore that piece off. She didn’t want to sound even slightly dejected. She wanted to visualise him reading the letter and smiling. Instead she wrote about something amusing that Josie had told her and ended on a happy note, before signing it ‘your loving friend, Hannah’.

  To make extra money, she did sewing for various people. She had worked as an alteration hand in one of the larger gown shops before her marriage, but with the two girls she couldn’t return to the shop and they weren’t willing for her to do the work on their very expensive gowns at home, in case of accidents.

  She had promised to finish a dress for one of Josie’s friends and it had taken much longer than she had expected. Already late with some other work she had promised for the following week, she was sitting near the window, concentrating on the smocking that would decorate the front of the pretty yellow party dress for the six-year-old, when there was a knock at the door.

  Johnny was home on leave and after seeing his father and changing his clothes, he had come straight away to see Hannah. The door was answered by her mother, who left him waiting on the doorstep while she told Hannah he was there.

  ‘Johnny! I didn’t know you were coming home!’ She smiled and hugged him as her mother quickly pushed the door shut so no one could see them.

  ‘Can you get out for an hour?’ he asked. ‘You don’t have to meet the girls until half-past three, do you?’

  ‘I have some sewing to finish by tomorrow, but, yes, of course I can spare an hour!’ She collected a coat and looked at the dress with its half-finished smocking. She would have to work half the night to finish it anyway.

  They walked hand in hand through the small park, where, wrapped up against the autumn chill, children played and mothers stood in groups.

  ‘Dad said you go down and show him my letters,’ he said. ‘Best I just write the one and you can share it.’ He grinned to show he was teasing.

  ‘Oh, no. Don’t stop writing to me, please! I look forward to your letters so much, and besides, your father likes to have a second news report to know you’re safe and well.’

  ‘He likes you calling to see him too.’

  ‘Does he? I hope so.’

  ‘Thanks, Hannah. He’s very much alone these days, with Taff and me in the army and the beach no longer filling his time. He has the fish-and-chip shop, but the clientele isn’t the same. At the beach everyone is out for a good time, there’s laughter and nonsense as they forget the tragedy of the war and have fun. The people who queue for their supper talk about nothing else but the latest war news and who is dead or injured. He finds it very depressing.’

  ‘Thank goodness he has Evelyn. Taff’s wife calls often, doesn’t she?’

  ‘She used to, but this winter the war seems to have changed everything. She works in a factory and goes out with the girls a couple of times a week, and just calls on Dad when she happens to be passing.’

  After that brief walk before rushin
g back to meet the girls, Hannah felt more secure in her relationship with Johnny. Nothing important had been said, but his fondness for her was more apparent, and when they parted, his kiss was more than the usual affectionate salute of friends, containing the promise of something more.

  She felt more secure, but as she allowed her imagination to roam, also more afraid. She didn’t know how she would cope with a relationship with Johnny, or anyone else, once they reached the stage of making love. Her experience of love-making had been so unhappy. But she pushed the thought aside, her emotions like a switchback ride.

  How could she imagine Johnny loving her? She was older by eight years and she had nothing to offer. Johnny was living far away from home, in an artificial situation with men from every strata of life teaching him things he would never have learned if life had remained normal. He needed her, but only while he was living away from home, afraid and lonely, where contact from the real world was desperately needed. Any day he could meet someone younger and without the trappings of children, an ex-husband and difficult parents, someone young and trouble free with whom he could live happily ever after.

  The thought wouldn’t go away as she sat into the early hours finishing the smocking. Ever afterwards, smocking on a yellow dress reminded her of that solemn night when she faced the fact that Johnny was unlikely to ever be more than a loving friend.

  She finished the dress and took the small payment, wondering why people refused to pay a reasonable portion of the money charged by a shop when the same work was done in the back room of a terraced house. War changed many things, but not attitudes like that, she thought wryly.

  * * *

  Lilly started work at the café at nine thirty the following Monday. She was half an hour late but this was excused, she thought, by the fact she was unused to finding a moment to wash with the rest of the family already in their routine. She smilingly told her boss that once the family had accepted that she was a working girl too, things would improve.

  After telling her three times to hurry and constantly having to remind her to go at once when someone entered and sat at a table, she was told, not very politely, that she would not be needed the following day.

  She smiled without rancour and told the boss it was for the best. She wasn’t used to having to rush. She then told her parents that someone else had applied and been given the job and they had forgotten to tell her she wasn’t needed. Then she happily settled to read the magazines she had bought and asked Beth to make her a cup of tea. Her burst of heroic industry had fizzled out like the proverbial damp squib.

  * * *

  Freddy managed to get a weekend pass but he didn’t write to tell Beth. Instead he telephoned the paper shop and told Shirley.

  ‘I can’t meet you in St David’s Well, mind,’ he said conspiratorially. ‘You’ll have to meet me somewhere out of town.’

  Boldly, Shirley suggested the Grantham, a rather run-down hotel that had once been as grand as its name implied.

  ‘It’s a hell of a long way out,’ he said.

  ‘We could stay overnight,’ she said as the pips went. She stood by the phone, ignoring the customers that were patiently waiting to be served and, as she expected, the phone rang again and a breathless Freddy said, ‘Did you mean it?’

  ‘Of course. I’ll book for us, shall I? Friday till Sunday?’

  ‘Well, yes, but—’

  He didn’t have the chance to say more, as Shirley interrupted him with, ‘Meet you there then.’ She smilingly replaced the receiver and went to serve her customers.

  Serve Beth right, she thought as she looked up the number of the Grantham to arrange the booking. If she doesn’t know how to keep someone like Freddy Clements happy, she can move over for someone who does!

  * * *

  Myrtle was slowly making progress in school and, to her surprise, became a bit of a celebrity, once her story about living off her wits and sleeping in an abandoned stable rippled through the classrooms. She began to use her experiences during the writing lesson, impressing her classmates by asking the teacher how to spell ‘orphan’, ‘abandoned’ and ‘deprived’, all words she had overheard Granny Moll and Auntie Audrey whisper when they were talking about her and Maude. Her writing was still large and untidy, but she began to practice after school and Audrey took great pleasure in helping her.

  ‘Why are you so determined to write well?’ Audrey asked one day. ‘You never practice your sums like you used to, and they’re equally important.’

  ‘I want to put a letter in the paper when I’m old enough, asking if anyone knows where our brother and sister-in-law are,’ Myrtle explained.

  Audrey hugged her and told her that if she thought it would do any good she would do that for her at once.

  ‘Then will you, please? They could be living near and not know how to find us.’

  A letter to the editor of the local paper resulted in a photograph of both girls appearing in the paper with an article explaining how they had come to live in Sidney Street with the Pipers.

  ‘Damn me,’ Huw grumbled. ‘When will I be allowed to use my own name? We’re the Castles. And I’d like people to know it, right?’

  The argument about the name of Piper’s Café wouldn’t go away. Marged insisted that the tradition was important, and it was such a well-known name that it would cause confusion to change it, but Huw argued that no one called Piper worked the stalls and cafés any more. ‘Castle’s, it should be,’ he insisted with increasing frustration over his wife’s stubbornness.

  ‘Castle’s Café,’ Marged sneered. ‘It sounds like something from Comic Cuts!’

  ‘Then call it just Castle’s.’

  ‘On a beach? It’s so daft it’ll seem like a joke!’

  The café was almost back to normal now. The building work was completed and a new fridge and a larger cooker had been installed. This had caused another argument, but one which Huw had won.

  ‘There’ll be more and more visitors now travel is restricted, what with petrol getting scarce and the trains being needed for the transport of soldiers and the rest,’ he prophesied. ‘There’s this meeting in town of all the people involved with holidays, not just us café owners but landladies and that newly formed entertainment committee. Rumour has it that the government is already talking about big campaigns to persuade people to spend their holidays at home. We’ve got to be prepared for the opening next May. Really prepared. It’s no good waiting till then and finding we need a bigger cooker.’ So Marged had agreed.

  ‘I miss your Granny Moll,’ Marged told Beth when they went to see the newly restored café. ‘She always had the last word and it made everything easier. However seriously your father and I disagreed, we both had to accept her final word. Now we seem to disagree on everything and there’s no one to help us settle it.’

  ‘The new sign isn’t up yet,’ Beth remarked, looking up at the front.

  ‘That’s something else we can’t agree on,’ Marged said. ‘It’s always been Piper’s and your father wants to change it to Castle’s.’

  Looking down at the deserted sands below, Beth grinned and said, ‘Castles in the air, eh?’

  ‘Daft name, Castle’s.’

  ‘You’re Mrs Castle, I’m Bethan Castle, you aren’t ashamed of it are you?’

  ‘Of course not! What an idea.’

  ‘Dad probably thinks you are.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Marged said dismissively, but Beth continued to look at her.

  ‘There’s only Auntie Audrey and if she eventually marries Wilf … Why don’t you do it as a surprise, Mam? I think Dad’s right, Castle’s it should be.’

  ‘No!’

  That evening the subject of the new name came up again and to Beth and Audrey’s alarm the argument was louder and more unpleasant than ever before.

  ‘You’ve already ordered it?’ Huw said angrily. ‘You’ve no right, Marged. This is a family business. It belongs to Bleddyn as well as the rest of us. We all contribute and we a
ll have a say. We’re supposed to talk about things, not watch you go out and do what you want.’

  ‘Forget it, Huw, the sign’s going up and that’s the end of it.’

  ‘Don’t do it,’ Huw warned. ‘Or I won’t wait for Mrs Downs to burn it down again. I’ll damned well burn it down myself!’

  ‘It’s Piper’s. That’s final.’

  ‘Then you work it without me. You never listen to me, do you? If you hadn’t employed that Downs woman against my wishes this wouldn’t have happened and we wouldn’t be arguing like this. Damn it all, I might just do it, too,’ he said, staring at her and striking his thumb against the wheel of his lighter. ‘Down to you the fire was, and I’ll never let you forget it.’

  Lilly, who was struggling to knit a pair of tiny socks, burst into tears.

  ‘What now?’ Huw said, exasperated.

  ‘Don’t argue about burning the place down,’ Lilly sobbed.

  ‘Joking he was, girl. As if one of us Pipers would burn down our own place,’ Marged soothed, at which point Lilly cried even louder.

  ‘It was me,’ she wailed. ‘I went to the café and – the man I was with – left a cigarette burning, I know he did and that was how it was burnt down and it’s all my fault.’

  Beth and Marged stared at her in disbelief. Only Huw spoke.

  ‘Thank God you didn’t own up before the insurance paid out!’

  Lilly took a lot of calming as she went on to tell them she felt responsible for Granny Moll’s heart attack and death.

  ‘I’m not thrilled to be told that you and this man, whoever he is, crept into the café and—’ Huw couldn’t finish the sentence. ‘But I still think that Mrs Downs had something to do with it. There was something about her face, the smirk she wore like a badge.’

  ‘It started in the corner behind the door where we used to sit,’ wailed Lilly.

  ‘Just near the letter box,’ he pointed out.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where people were in the habit of pushing rubbish through.’