The Consequences of War

by Betty Burton

  ‘You might laugh, I bloody nearly did. Theirs is one of those in the middle of the row that’s had a frosted-glass door put in and one of them new-fangled rat-trap letter boxes right down where it breaks your back and every dog in the road can cock his leg on it.’

  ‘You shouldn’t put up with that, Charlie. See your Union about it.’

  Missing the irony in his father’s tone but hearing the word Union and knowing what would come next if he didn’t go now, Charlie gathered up the few letters he still had to deliver. ‘Ah. Well, I’d better get on.’

  ‘It’s what you got a Union for to protect you from that kind of thing. It’s what you pay dues for.’

  ‘Don’t start, Sam,’ Dolly said. ‘Take no notice, Charlie, you go on and get your round finished.’

  ‘You’d best tell the Union that that’s what dues is for then, Dad: they thinks it’s for building a bloody great office in Southampton.’ Still not seeing his father’s purse-lipped smile, ‘So long, Dad.’

  Dolly watched her son rebutton his tunic, run the crown of his uniform cap around his elbow and place it squarely on the fine head of hair which he had inherited from the Partridges.

  ‘Charlie.’

  Charlie swivelled his head to settle his hair inside the cap and patted the shoulder-strap of his delivery bag in place. ‘I have to get on.’ But he stayed until his father had had his say.

  ‘You swore twice in the last five minutes. I never swore in my life and don’t expect any of mine to neither, whether they’re grown men or not – and specially in front of your mother. If you was still living under my roof, I should a had a bit more than this to say.’

  ‘Ah, sorry, Mum. It just slips out.’

  ‘No, it don’t,’ Dolly said, ‘not if you don’t let it.’

  ‘All right, Mum.’

  ‘Just watch it, lad.’

  ‘I will.’ Now he had got as far as the back gate.

  ‘Oh, and Charlie,’ his father called, ‘your Diddle’m club’s due.’

  ‘I’ll get Marie to give it to Mum.’

  ‘Remind her, you’ll be glad of it at Christmas.’

  I’m twenty-five, Mum. I’m married, Dad. I’ve got a wife, and a child starting school in September. Stop bloody treating me like I was still a kid. Not aloud of course. Mum and Dad only ever had the best interests of the family at heart. Mum was right – she always was – they would be glad of the money at Christmas.

  1939

  Spring

  On that same morning, at about the same time as Charlie Partridge was finishing off his, round, Eve Hardy went down the drive so as to waylay Markham’s longest serving postman, Mont Iremonger, before he rounded the bend in the drive where there was a view from the house. Eve Hardy was the same age as Georgia Kennedy but, unlike Georgia, who was a born and bred country girl, Eve was born in Markham and bred in the finest educational establishments that money could buy. Eve Hardy was the daughter of‘Hardy’s Cakes Like Mother Bakes’.

  ‘Morning, Miss Eve.’

  ‘Hello, Mr Iremonger. Shall I take the post?’ She put out her hand for the large bundle, but the postman held it back playfully but respectful.

  ‘Shouldn’t rightly do that, Miss. I’m supposed to deliver to the premises. But…’ waggling the letters as though she was still seven… ‘seeing there’s so many ha’penny ones I reckon it’s somebody’s birthday…’ Two-handed he presented them to her as he had done for nineteen years.

  ‘Must be twenty, is it twenty-one?’ He knew very well what it was, for as well as the unsealed ha’penny envelopes, there was a coloured postcard without an envelope from the Hardys’ daily woman and another from their washer-woman. Both cards the same, a photo of a silver key and a girl with primroses and Happy Twenty-First. But Royal Mail employee Mont Iremonger had officially blind eyes to everything except names and addresses, particularly Longmile. This being a group of houses so grand as to suggest that they could scarcely be thought to be part of a market town at all. Even so, the Longmile address was Markham.

  Eve took the cards and tried to be casual about riffling through them. ‘Twenty-one today.’

  ‘Congratulations, Miss.’ Mont Iremonger knew what she was looking for, the letter with a Portsmouth postmark which he had placed at the bottom of the pile. A flush crept over her cheeks as she discovered it and slipped it into a side-pocket of her summer skirt. Charlie Partridge would have given her the letter and said, ‘Well, here’s your love-letter. You’re still sweet on Dave Greenaway then? I’ll bet your Dad would have something to say if he found out.’ But then Charlie Partridge delivered mail to a very different part of Markham.

  ‘Be back with another lot at midday, I dare say.’

  ‘Pa’s giving me a party, I’ll save you a piece of cake for tomorrow.’

  The Hardys’ house being the last delivery, Mont Iremonger mounted his bike and headed back towards town. What would Young Eve’s father say if he knew she was getting letters from the Greenaway boy? There wasn’t much in Markham didn’t eventually reach the eyes and ears of Councillor Hardy. He’d soon put a stop to it if he got to find out his precious daughter was writing to a sailor brought up in a Markham newsagents and tobacconists – and a Greenaway at that.

  He’ll never get to hear of it from me. Young Eve’s been running to get the letters since she could walk, a proper little joy, like a godchild or a granddaughter. I wouldn’t give her away to him in a hundred years. In any case I don’t actually know that they’re letters from the Greenaway boy… can’t tell much from a cancellation stamp, can you? Only thing I know is that young Greenaway is in the Navy and he’s in Portsmouth. No business of mine who’s writing letters to who.

  Twenty-one! He had reached the bottom of Longmile Hill before he was smitten with the realization that young Eve had stopped being a girl. Middle-age creeping up on you, Mont. Really though, in her pinky skirt and sandals, she didn’t look that much different this morning than when she was about twelve. Young minx, though, going behind her father’s back like that. But there, if you was a man like Councillor Hardy, you shouldn’t be surprised if people went behind your back.

  It was evening before other scales dropped from his eyes and revealed to him the truth about his own ageing. The thought of the lonely road that stretched to the cemetery clutched at his stomach and dried his throat. Next year this time, I shall be retired. He thought the sunset looked ominous and took himself off to The Orb and Sceptre for a pint of bitter.

  1989

  The lovely Tuscany golden terracotta rambling house, under the Tuscany morning sun, seemed empty now that the children had gone. A special visit to celebrate her seventy-first birthday. Celebrate? How Eve begrudged each year as her precious sands flowed through her fast-emptying hourglass. Each time they left, she wondered whether next time they came it would be for her funeral. Not that she felt ready to go, never had a day’s illness in her life, but she was getting old.

  Give me fifteen more years and I’ll go quietly. Now that most of her life was gone, she wanted to stay alive more than she had ever wanted to. To see Josh growing up. One expected to feel strong emotions for one’s children, but to feel such passion for grandchildren… and now a great-grandchild… that was something she had never expected.

  ‘Grandma?’ She would never forget Fergus’s exulted voice down the telephone. ‘Grandma, you’ve got a great-grandson. Eight pounds eight ounces, bald as a coot and noisy as all Hell – Joshua. Montague.’ Fergus had an unsentimental feeling for family and history. In naming his first child he had remembered the old man who had been dead long before he was born.

  ‘Thank you, Fergus.’

  ‘No problem, Gran – any time.’

  ‘Lucky little Joshua – having a Dad like you.’

  ‘I’ll bet you say that to all your grandsons.’

  How the year had flown since then. She had never forgotten how endless her own firstborn’s first year had been. How angst-ridden. Poor Melanie had had the worst of it.
How had she ever managed to produce such a prize as Fergus, who had had the masculine charm of Eve’s own father but not a trace of the old devil’s nature – thank God?

  1939

  Spring

  At the end of her first day of freedom, Georgia Kennedy looked back upon it with slight regret at having frittered it away without having done anything very spectacular at all except to go into the Town Hall in response to an appeal for women voluntary workers, and to buy a half-bottle of Gilbeys. Gin, to her chagrin, she liked, even though, as Hugh had pointed out, gin was such a common drink compared to Scotch. Scotch and Soda… Whisky Mac… Scotch on the rocks, but gin and orange… Mother’s Ruin.

  ‘Gin, Georgia? That’s a drink for a shop-girl on the razzle. If you must drink gin, at least learn to drink it with tonic.’

  ‘But it has such a bitter taste, Hugh.’

  ‘Try it. Scotch for me and a Gee and Tee for my good lady here.’

  Presumably, because of its ‘common’ associations in Hugh’s mind, they never had gin in the house, even at Christmas when he always got in a supply of port and lemon for the ladies.

  It was early evening, and she sat in the garden drinking gin – and tonic, which she had learned to like – and wondering what she could do with all this freedom. The weather was exceptionally good, almost like July.

  Hugh had been very put out when she had made her own suggestion.

  ‘Georgia! Go out to work? For God’s sake… officers’ wives don’t go out to work any more than managers’ wives do.’

  ‘I don’t see why not.’

  ‘Of course you damned well see why not, they just don’t.

  As a kind of marzipan on the basic cake of her girlhood training in ‘niceness’, Georgia Kennedy had spent the last two years learning what women like herself ‘just didn’t’. Lately, she had begun to wonder why, instead of marrying a secretary with countrified origins, Hugh had not gone for one of the girls who were always so eager to partner him at tennis, or who at cricket pounced upon him with plates of sandwiches and cakes. They were his type – off-the-peg Officers’ and Managers’ wives. They knew unfailingly the etiquette of taking paid or charitable work, and the social position of a gin and orange, and what their set just didn’t.

  ‘Forget it! It’s ridiculous! If you want something to do with your spare time, you take over my place on the Tennis Club Committee.’

  ‘Oh Hugh! You know I can’t stand them, and I didn’t mean spare time… I meant…’

  ‘If you can’t stand the Committee, how do you think you’d fare with a room full of clerks?’

  ‘I used to stand them all right before I married… and I didn’t mean…’

  ‘That was different. You worked in my office then.’

  ‘It was just an office full of clerks and I…’

  ‘And I was Manager.’

  As in the past it had been with her mother, so her arguments with Hugh always ended with Georgia shutting up, silenced by their self-assurance and her lack of it.

  She picked up the writing-pad and read over the four pages she had written to her parents, every line of which was what they wanted to hear.

  Could I tell you, Dad, that I hadn’t been married a week before I realized that I had made a mistake?

  Could I explain to you, Ma, how hungry for something I always feel? That I’m not satisfied as I’m supposed to be with bed-linen Mondays, polishing Tuesdays, baking Wednesdays, cleaning Thursdays, shopping Fridays, Sports Club Saturdays and Cricketing Sundays, but starved of something filling and full of flavour?

  I wish I could write and ask you things that really matter. I should ask you to tell me why you’ve always seemed ashamed of coming from country families, why you’ve kept the Honeycombes and the Gracelands at arm’s length, why you are never satisfied and don’t seem to be able to settle down. But their family wasn’t like that, they never said the things that counted.

  Georgia sealed down the letter, addressed it to Mr and Mrs Honeycombe, Widdershins Guest House, Cults, Aberdeen, and sat thinking of them, hoping that they felt rewarded now by their small guest house in Scotland, for all the years of budgeting to save minute amounts from the small profits of running the village pub.

  Georgia poured herself a refill. Freedom from Ma, freedom from Dad, freedom from Hugh, freedom from their ideas of what is best for Georgia. It’s my last chance to do… something.

  1939

  Summer

  There was something in the air of Aldershot that worked on Major Hugh Kennedy like spiked wine. The bones of his vertebrae fused, his jaw squared off and protruded inches high above the strangling knot of his tie, and his heels went click, click, click, click to the strict beat of the dual metronomes of his swinging arms.

  He faced the desk and saluted the King’s Army in the person of his superior officer.

  ‘At ease.’ The old officer’s voice was dark and gravelly from years of being raised so that damn-fool natives could understand his lingo. By rights, he should have been raising it at their damn-fool white counterparts in some piddling south-coast town like Lewes, or Hove or Southsea. But because of’this little lot’ about to start on the other side of the Channel, he was reprieved from expulsion from the only man’s-life worth living.

  Until the Hun was put down, and he with any luck had his own light put out with honour on the field of battle, the robes and runes and symbols of military life were still his. They were going to need every old war-horse they could muster before this little lot was over.

  ‘Sit down, man.’ He moved his cane a fraction closer to his gloves and smoothed the rim of his cap in which they were contained. Before he addressed his inferior officer, he ran his hands over his buttons, buckles and badges.

  ‘Yes… Well, young… ah… Kennedy…’

  ‘Sir!’

  ‘Got these billy-doos from the War Office. Says here you’ve been in the Boys’ Brigade then?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Chaps here don’t go a bundle on weekend soldiers, but never mind… right idea. Do with young blood. Get in now – and you’ll get promotion goin’ like a dose of liquorice powder.’ He signed the papers with the dash of a cavalry officer with no time to waste on such damn piddling rubbish.

  Young Kennedy waited three seconds to see whether there were any further formalities. There were not. He stood up and with two clicks was to attention.

  ‘That’s the ticket, Majah. Welcome to the Hogs. Best regiment in the world.’

  Young Kennedy saluted.

  The old war-horse returned the salute and felt to see if his epaulettes were still there whilst the young officer clicked his way across the shining floor and out into the sunshine.

  The eyes of the two men had never made contact. Which was as it should be in the men’s world.

  1939

  People had very ambivalent feelings about Connie Hardy. She had everything anyone could want – big house with acres of grounds, a car of her own, loads of clothes, holidays on ocean liners, people to do her work for her but… she was married to Freddy Hardy.

  Councillor Hardy was a big fish in the Markham pond – so big that there was little room for anything else except small fry. In fact, Councillor Hardy was a pike with a successful mass production bakery business. Having consumed the local competition, he was ready to move into deeper waters.

  He saw the approaching war as his chance to make a Million.

  Aldershot camp was well within his delivery area, as were Bovey Tracey and Salisbury Plain: all encampments where many soldiers would eat huge quantities of bread.

  Connie and Freddy Hardy had had only one child. Eve, whose twenty-first birthday it was today. The party was flawed in Connie’s eyes, because she knew that, for all her planning, her husband would turn it into something unstylish and quite vulgar.

  ‘No time, trouble, effort or money spared, Con. I’ll supply the cash, and leave the rest to you.’

  But he never could, never would, never did!

&nb
sp; ‘Next to Eve’s wedding, this will be Markham’s event of the decade.’

  He adjusted the white silk triangle in the breast-pocket of his dinner jacket. He was one of those men black tie dress was made for. He looked handsome, and knew that he looked handsome. Even more so now that his hair had thinned almost to baldness, giving him that remarkable combination of virility and maturity.

  ‘How’s that?’

  Elegant Connie paused for a moment from rolling up her fine silk stockings and looked across at him. Neither of them looked their age.

  ‘You look very handsome, Freddy.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘You always do, and you know it. As your mother says – Freddy could charm the birds from the trees.’

  How else, Connie thought, did so many people tolerate him? Well, fear for one thing, I suppose. Fingers in everybody’s pies. Wealth? Money buys a fair bit of tolerance. And charm. Power, money and charm – what else did a man need to take his place at the top of the pile?

  He had good bones, sensuous mouth, deep-set eyes and straight nose, all of which, plus his well set-up body on which clothes hung perfectly, had the effect of making people believe that there was charm in his ruthlessness. There was not, of course – ruthlessness never has charm – but people will believe anything if it suits them or if they are flattered.

  Connie Hardy knew every one of his faults and forgave him none of them, yet she was still attracted to him after nearly twenty-five years of marriage. The Councillor’s enemies would say, ‘She’s such a lady and he’s such a swine really – it makes you wonder what she ever saw in him.’

  When he was at his worst, Connie Hardy often wondered the same thing. When at his best, she knew. In bed, they were very good together.

  Twice she had decided to leave, only to find herself the next day in a state of satiety, as she always was when he turned on the charm – pleading and promising and stroking and combining romance with practised love-making. He was a double-dealer at heart. For twenty-five of her forty-five years she had been bound and gagged by him. Silver-chain bonds and silken gags, it is true, but she had never been free of him for a day. Her libido was strong, and had been fixed upon him from the day they met.