by Betty Burton
‘Don’t put yourself down, my dear. You are the best thing that has happened to Mont Iremonger in forty years or more. Lord love you, what other pensioner gets to take out the three beauties of Markham.’ Fondling and playing with the little dog to cover his embarrassment. ‘An’t that right, little Yap? You and me has a good time together.’
1989
Leonora drove her hire-car towards Hursley, trying to recall what it had been like that day in 1944 when she had gone to Farley Mount. In this country, the media was building up towards what looked like being a great climax of old film and tattoos and fireworks on the fiftieth anniversary of VE day in September. It had already had one bite of the cherry with a D-Day anniversary last month, when Leonora had heard on the car radio, as she toured the UK like the American tourist she now was, wartime songs she had not heard for fifty years, yet whose words she could still remember without falter.
As she watched for a break in the Clearway lines, she hummed to herself. That day in 1944 when they had come along here on their cycles, this road had been narrow and pale grey and bendy, and it had been ribbed with silvery tracks of all the tanks that had gone along it assembling for D-Day. It was now a wide, black orderly highway with road junctions where there had then been dusty unsurfaced lanes slipping off to unsignposted villages. In spite of there having then been such a concentration of men and vehicles, today’s constant stream of cars seemed to be so much more stressful and obtrusive.
Or does it only seem like that because I was fifteen and more aware of me than of what was going on?
More aware of Waldemar.
Waldemar, blond and startlingly blue-eyed, who was so attractive in his POW clothes with the diamond target between his shoulders. Waldemar, still wearing his Luftwaffe cap against regulations. Waldemar Altzheiber, who had been one of the gang of hired labour cutting the hedges round the field at the back of Station Avenue.
On the day of the picnic, Waldemar was too new a phenomenon to understand. He was the enemy her Dad had been fighting, he was a Luftwaffe pilot who had probably dropped bombs all over England… and yet he would not keep out of her thoughts or her dreams – such dreams… dreams that made her afraid in case she should talk in her sleep and Mam should hear.
That day, as today, had been burning hot. That entire summer of ’44, as this one of ’89, had been long and hot and dry. But the air then had been light and easy to breathe, because the roads then were empty of most traffic except military. Today there was a constant stream of cars, some doing ninety, and vast container lorries with continental registrations doing speeds that caused a slip-stream.
She came to the Farley Mount turn-off. Everything had changed. It looked as though the place had become part of the tourist and leisure industry. She parked and walked to where they had all posed for the old man to draw them. Mam had never known about that sketch: Waldemar had taken it back when he was repatriated and had returned it to her on the day they married. Twenty years difference in their ages, yet the marriage had been good whilst it lasted. Greater difference in age than there had been between Little-Lena and Mrs Kennedy when they had gripped hands so tightly the day before the war had broken out.
She sat beside the odd monument to a horse and lit a cigarette as she had done fifty years ago, but now without the kind of ceremony of Georgia’s cigarette case and flint-sparking lighter, without the excitement of being invited to accept a symbol of modern womanhood. ‘Have one, but don’t tell your mother.’
Leonora Altzheiber was both excited and apprehensive at the prospect of meeting Georgia Kennedy again. For fifty years she had kept another secret which Mrs Kennedy had confided in her. At the time, no one else knew why she had disappeared from Markham, where she had gone, and why she had left so suddenly – not even Eve Hardy had known. Georgia Kennedy had told only young Leonora Wiltshire – and it had been painful to know.
1944
Summer
In the small world of the Dinner Kitchens, girls and women came and went. Perhaps to bigger money-making munitions; or because of a pregnancy caused by an over-glamorous romance with a Yank leading to expectations of a ranch in Texas; or – in the case of evacuated families – to return home to Bomb Alleys that had gone quiet. Almost an institution now, but certainly not establishment, were four of the women who had been there from the early days – Dorothy and Marie Partridge, Mrs Farr and Georgia.
At some time or other during those years, there were shortages of almost every kind of food and ingredient. Fortunately not everything ever disappeared at the same time. If the hated yellow dried-egg was in short supply, then the even more hated vivid yellow custard powder substitute came in. If the dried household milk which wasn’t very popular disappeared, lovely sweet tinned condensed milk came in. Fifty per cent of all sausages disappeared when they were cooked, as the high proportion of water-soaked cereal they contained exploded through the skins – nobody ever saw a sausage unless it was laid open as though dissected. Mrs Farr and Dorothy devised potato toppings and gave them a catchy name – but they were still Bangers. Somebody always came up with something, so that The Markham Town Restaurant came to have a much better reputation than the usual run of British Restaurants which were the pay-dirt of comedians.
There was a shortage of jam-jars, but throughout the year Dorothy would offer local children threepence a dozen for clean jars or a slice of bread pudding – the spicy smell of which almost always weakened their resolve to take the money. In summer Georgia organized, through the schools, hedgerow hunts for berries, and paid spot cash to the young scavengers who thought they were on to a good thing because blackberries and rosehips were free and plentiful around Markham. Ursula and her helpers used every pound of sugar allocation and every bottle of pectin for jam-making, bottled plums by the stone and dried apples by the hundredweight.
Marie had become Queen of the Till. Pretty and always looking fresh and nicely made-up, she was popular and had her regulars who brought her a few duck-eggs or a string of onions and a bunch of sweet-williams and, on occasions, perhaps a banana or orange or some similar rare delicacy from a crate ‘dropped’ whilst off-loading at Southampton Docks.
She and Paula often went out together, sometimes to the Air Force administration offices, or to a dance at the Yankee base, and once or twice to a social at Oaklands but, although Marie felt sorry for the boys there, she couldn’t stand what she saw in their frightened eyes and the way they went quiet and withdrawn, even when they were supposed to be on the mend. ‘I don’t know how nurses like Eve Hardy can stand it.’
But Paula would carefully coat her Cyd Charisse legs with leg make-up and dance with any of the Oaklands boys, however close to breaking point they were. ‘Poor little things. They’re only kids who have been frightened out of their wits at the terrible things they’ve seen.’ And she would hold them close and kiss them goodnight and try to make them feel like men again.
The Partridge family was not what it had been. It seemed a lifetime since Charlie joined up. Bonnie, ten years old now, mentioned him only because people talked of him to her: he was no more real to her than Jesus or God, but if people said there was Dad and Jesus, then there probably were.
Harry came and went in his well-pressed sergeant’s uniform, red beret and glossy boots, never there for more than twenty-four hours, going back to wherever another batch of men needed training into the techniques of leaping into mid-air suspended from a canopy of silk that they hoped would unfold, and if it did unfold would not carry them behind the enemy lines.
As the war dragged on and every able-bodied labouring man not essential to the war effort was being called up, Sam Partridge had only a boy of fourteen to help keep the park going. No model of the abbey fashioned from growing sempervivums had been made for years, nor any patterned carpets of miniature plants; even the herbaceous borders had been left so long to their own devices that all lupins were blue, all hollyhocks pink and single, and marigolds grew from every crevice of the retaining wall.<
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This summer it all seemed too much. The weather was depressing: as he went about trying to keep some control over the acres of grass and trees, he seemed to hear the turf cracking open it was so dry. On some days he hadn’t the heart even to go near to the old bowling green with its display of ox-eye daisies and bents and had consciously to put out of his mind the vision of its old velvet lushness, when a good player could bowl a wood along the rink and know that there was not one to touch it for miles.
At the time when the Germans were driving their way towards England or into Russia, Sam had plotted their advances and retreats with pins and flags on maps, but once the fighting was taken into countries like Greece, Africa and the Philippines, he felt no personal involvement. He would have preferred a simple confrontation with the Germans in the place where he had left his legs.
‘I shan’t put up with much more of him, he’s making everybody’s life a misery,’ Dolly declared frequently to Paula and Marie.
‘What can anybody do, though?’
‘I don’t know. But I reckon it’s only my job and you and Bonnie stops me sticking the bread-knife in him at times.’
‘Oh Mum, that’s not like you.’
‘Isn’t it? You’d be surprised, Marie. Since Mr O’Neill’s been trying to make this documentary film, life hasn’t hardly been worth living.’
‘You’d think he’d be proud they chose you.’
‘Proud! He’s jealous.’
‘Of Mr O’Neill?’
‘You’d think it was a film about a scarlet woman dancing the can-can instead of how ordinary women are managing homes and jobs.’
Dolly didn’t miss the look that Paula and Marie exchanged.
‘I think he believes that every woman in Markham is scarlet,’ Paula said.
It came to a head one hot evening when Dolly had stayed behind at the Dinner Kitchens for Niall O’Neill to do some filming there. Bonnie was having a last evening at the swimming pool which was about to be closed down because the filtration plant had packed up and it had been commandeered anyway. Marie and Paula were waiting in Dolly’s kitchen for Bonnie to come in.
Sam made the same sort of remark that he had made frequently about Dolly and married women generally always gadding about when Paula turned on him furiously.
‘Ever since I was little we’ve all made excuses because of your legs,’ Paula said harshly. ‘You’ve been sarcastic to me, bitter to Mum, who God knows has had enough to put up with your moods. Is it her fault you haven’t got a decent pension? She’s made something of herself, but have you ever given her one word of praise or encouragement? Never!’
Marie’s pent-up feelings about years of not wanting to say anything because she was only the daughter-in-law were now unleashed by Paula’s righteous attack and she could not hold back. ‘And the same goes for Charlie,’ she said. ‘Till he joined up, he done everything he could for you, never a morning went by without he didn’t come in and see you was all right, and you never had it in you to say anything but what it was to interfere in our lives. Don’t have a tanner on the horses, Charlie, go to your Union meeting, Charlie, time you hoed up your potatoes, Charlie. He was nearly thirty when he went in the RAF and you was still treating him like you was the head of our family instead of Charlie. And now I hear you starting on Bonnie. She’s my daughter. I don’t want her brought up in your ways. All right, she has to fend for herself sometimes when I’m at work, but there’s nothing wrong with that. Can’t you see that you’re turning everybody away from you. Everybody loves you, but you make it bloody hard for us.’ She flushed at the first swearword she had ever said outside her own four walls.
The old man’s eyes narrowed, but Paula wouldn’t let him fill the pause.
‘Especially Harry. He’s been trying since he was two to get you to give him a hap’orth of praise, but you’ve been as stingy with your praise as you’ve been with your love.’
He did not reply, but sat there and said nothing, letting it all pour over him until Bonnie’s bicycle bell sounded and she and Dolly were heard chattering happily in the kitchen.
Dolly had put her head round the door and seen their faces all turned from one another and felt the tension and had known better than to throw a match into that particular box of dry matchwood.
Brightly, she said, ‘What do you think? The chip-shop was open, and it’s only Monday. They had some real cod extra to their allocation, so they opened an extra evening. She was only going to let me have two pieces, but Bonnie come along so she let her have two and she cheeked him for another one.’
Sam Partridge’s heart ached to see Charlie: there were times when he felt sick at the thought of him being God-knew-where and in God-knew-what danger. Now they had all turned on him, except Charlie. Two and a half years and he hadn’t hardly clapped eyes on his son.
* * *
‘Would you like me to come with you, Eve?’
‘Would you, Monty? I don’t know why I should, but I feel quite edgy about it. Isn’t that silly, it was my home for twenty-five years.’
‘It’s only natural after a bust-up like that.’
They cycled through the silent, early-morning Sunday town. Along the wide main Winchester Road with its respectable large bay-fronted semis with front gardens, past small terraces, mean-windowed narrow cottages, Edwardian villas with uncontrolled wistaria and unpruned forsythia, past Victorian residences with monkey-puzzle trees, all temporarily in free neighbourly association now that they shared the same absence of railings and gates, the same emergency water supply, street wardens and stirrup-pumps. Beyond the railway arch a pub and, where the ground began to rise so that Mont and Eve had to dismount, potato fields and a clapped-out old mansion, and at the crest the cottage hospital in its flowery grounds where they stopped to take breath as the heat of the late spring began to shimmer off the roofs of Markham.
‘It’s not such a bad old place,’ Mont said, mopping his red face.
‘I think it’s lovely from here. Looks as though it hasn’t changed in hundreds of years.’
‘Well it has, you know. Only the bricks and mortar are the same. Everything else has been changed out of all recognition by the war, and it won’t ever go back.’
‘What about Oaklands when it’s finished being a hospital, and the Chapel Hall when they close down the Town Restaurant, and the munitions factory and the little engineering works – Georgia and I were talking about it. All those women having their small freedoms for the duration of the war. How can they cope with going back to their old domestic life, playing second fiddle?’
‘“How they goin’ to keep ’em down on the farm, now that they’ve seen Paree”? D’you know that song?’
‘Sort of.’
‘It’s all happened before. Not only just to women. Ordinary blokes go in the Forces, get to see foreign parts, camels, pyramids, icebergs. Some of them get two or three stripes and find they’re as capable of organizing the setting up of a camp as their old bosses were of setting up a factory.’ Slowly they resumed the last half-mile along the road towards Eve’s old home, making no attempt to cycle, Eve content to listen to the old man who had carried their mail along this route twice a day all her growing years.
He sweated and puffed a little, but did not stop his flow. ‘There’ll be them who fly in aeroplanes or sit in holds of the big liners, sub-mariners and others who’ve been behind barbed-wire for months. It only needs one man to say out loud what he’s been thinking – “There’s something wrong somewhere” and they’ll all see that there is.’
‘My Ma says there are Reds everywhere.’
‘And Lady Connie might just be right.’
They had arrived at the entrance to The Cedars drive, along which a hundred years ago a white tourer tied with satin ribbons had been driven by a plump blonde girl who used to be the daughter of the house.
They halted briefly. She said, ‘Oh,’ and they walked on towards the house where they propped their bicycles against a sagging, overgrown pe
rgola. She rang the doorbell but there was no response. ‘There’s no car about, so he probably isn’t here.’ She tried her key, but it would not turn in the lock.
Mont tried. ‘There’s one already in… oh, it’s open. Do you want me to go and have a look round. We should have brought Yap.’
Eve laughed, ‘Oh yes, he’d soon sink his gums into an intruder. Come on, let’s go and find some boxes and get my stuff packed.’ As she walked through the hallway, she called out, but there was no response.
‘The place looks deserted, don’t it?’
‘Look in here, Monty, everything’s packed up.’
Of all the furnishings that had once made The Cedars unique, the only items remaining were the great velvet curtains and voile drapes, the rest was in packing-cases or furniture crates. Swiftly she ran upstairs, where she found her own room tidy and neat, as she had left it. Her clothes were as she had left them, except that each hanger had a Mothak ring and all the drawers contained bags of crystals.
In her parents’ room she found a few shoes and some odd items of women’s clothing that were certainly not Connie’s. A blouse label read ‘Greenleaf and Gale – New York’.
Mont found plenty of empty cartons left by the packers, to which Eve quickly transferred her few possessions and stacked them in the corner of her old room. ‘He’s leaving, Monty.’
‘Looks like it.’
‘Then there’s probably some truth in what Mr Greenaway found out.’
‘You don’t want to jump to conclusions. It might be that he just finds the place too big.’
‘That needn’t stop him telling me and Connie.’
Mont Iremonger kept his thoughts to himself. What sort of a man is it runs out on his own daughter without saying anything?
‘Perhaps he was going to tell you.’
