by Anne Bennett
‘Oh, to be a fly on the wall.’
‘I’ll say. I’d be rubbing my hands with glee to see that woman get her comeuppance, for all she is my aunt.’
‘Oh, let’s draw a line under the bloody woman,’ Carmel said. ‘I am fed up talking about her. Let’s plan the party instead—a much nicer subject to discuss altogether—and I think one of the first things to do is introduce ourselves to the neighbours. I haven’t seen them except to nod to, taking things to the bin or hanging out a bit of washing, because I thought I would leave formal introductions until you arrived. They are an oldish couple and as tomorrow is Saturday we might get both of them in if we go round in the afternoon. I’d hate to get off on the wrong foot and let the first time we meet them be when they come round to complain about the noise of the house-warming.’
Lois could see the sense of that. The next afternoon, the two girls knocked at the house next door and met George and Ruby Hancock. The couple had been intrigued by the set-up next door to them and were delighted to discover two young married couples would be living there, all with respectable jobs and the girls, at least, with impeccable manners.
‘We’ve been here all our married lives,’ Ruby said. ‘Brought a family up, only now they are grown and scattered. The house is too big for us now. Me and George rattle around in it and we keep saying we should move to somewhere smaller, and we probably should but…well, the house is full of memories. Anyroad, we know the area here and it’s that convenient for everything, as you will find out before you’ve been here very long.’
‘I’m sure we will,’ Carmel said. ‘I am impressed already with the amount of shops just a stone’s throw away. But the point is, we wanted to give a house-warming party and—;’
‘Don’t you worry about making a bit of noise,’ Ruby said. ‘Young people have to enjoy themselves, we know that.’
‘You’re more than welcome to join us.’
‘Well, it’s not really our thing, but we may look in.’
They did look in, for as Ruby said to her husband later, ‘I mean, when you think of rented houses like this, we could have all sorts of riff-raff living next door instead of those two lovely girls. I would like the opportunity to meet their husbands too.’
‘Well, I don’t mind showing my face,’ George said with a sneaky smile at his wife. ‘They’ll likely have some good beer in and a chance of a bit of decent food for once in my life.’
‘Any more comments like that, my lad, and you will be in no fit state to go there or anywhere else,’ Ruby commented grimly, and George burst into gales of laughter at the outraged look on his wife’s face.
The Hancocks fitted in remarkably well. They obviously liked young people, and they confessed they were never happler than when their grown children converged on the house, filling it again with noise and bustle.
All in all, the house-warming party was a terrific success. Many of Carmel and Lois’s fellow nurses came, and Paul and Chris had invited some junior doctors and medical students too. Lois was particularly pleased to see Sylvia and Jane. They, of course, wanted to talk about Lois’s wedding and what had happened at it. They both said they’d never seen such a display of bad manners and it was hard to believe that such nice people as Paul and Lois had grown up so normal. Carmel could do nothing other than agree with them.
Carmel had been impressed and relieved to find out that Lois could cook well.
‘I learned fast when I was looking after my mother,’ she said. ‘Nothing fuelled her rage more than singed meat, inadequately drained cabbage or lumpy gravy.’ She smiled and went on, ‘The odd slap is a great incentive to getting it right.’
‘You had better mete it out to me then,’ Carmel said with a grin. ‘There was never much in the way of food to cook in the house I was reared in and, of course, then I had all my meals at the nurses’ home, as you did, so I have no idea how to go about it.’
‘Oh, you will soon pick it up. The basic things are just common sense, really, and even the other stuff—well, anyone can follow a recipe,’ Lois said. ‘I bet you will be a dab hand at it in no time at all.’
However, the good food did help the party go with a swing and afterwards there was dancing, the music emanating from Lois’s gramophone records, and everyone talked of the party for days afterwards.
The months slid by, the two young couples adjusting to married life and the crazy hours they all seemed to be working, and looking forward to the festive season and a chance of a little time together. Carmel had never had Christmas off since she had begun at the hospital but this time she had put in for it and so had Paul, feeling they would like to spend their first Christmas as a married couple together rather than in two separate hospitals. Lois and Chris felt the same and the four of them were delighted that their applications were successful.
In the very early hours of Christmas Day, as Carmel and Paul left the Abbey after Midnight Mass, it was so bone-chillingly cold Carmel thought she could smell it. She also felt and heard the frost crackle beneath her feet as, hand in hand with Paul, she scurried home and, despite the arctic chill, with, the beautiful Latin words of the Mass and the familiar carols still running around her head, she felt at peace with the world.
The house was chilly too: the fires banked up for safety lent little heat to either the breakfast room or their own lounge, and Carmel was glad she had had the foresight to put the hot-water bottles in the beds before they had left the house.
‘Go on up,’ Paul said, giving Carmel’s bottom a little pat. ‘I’ll bring us up a cup of tea laced with whiskey to put new heart into us and then when we have that finished, I will warm you up properly.’
Carmel shivered and scampered up the stairs in delicious anticipation for the sex side of their marriage, though it wasn’t as often as they might like, due to their working schedule, just got better.
The next morning, when Carmel opened her eyes, it was to see Paul sitting on the edge of the bed getting dressed. He smiled when he saw she was awake, leaned over and gave her a kiss.
‘Happy Christmas, Mrs Connolly.’
‘And the season’s greetings to you, Mr Connolly.’
‘Are you happy, darling?’
‘Happier than I can ever remembering feeling,’ Carmel answered sincerely.
Paul eyed the bed longingly and Carmel knew exactly what he was thinking, but they could hear that Chris and Lois were already up, and regretfully Carmel shook her head. ‘We have to go down,’ she said.
Paul sighed. ‘I know, but later we’ll make up for it,’
‘You’re on,’ said Carmel, as she leaped out of bed and started to dress.
As soon as the debris from the breakfast had been tidied away, the girls began to prepare the mammoth dinner. They had just finished and gone back into the breakfast room to join Chris and Paul when there was a knock at the door. They were intrigued as to who would visit on a Christmas morning. Paul went to open it and came back with his father, who carried in his hands two bottles of champagne, both tied up with ribbon.
‘My goodness,’ he said as soon as he was over the threshold, breathing in deeply, ‘something smells good. Magnificent, in fact.’
‘That’s Lois’s dinner cooking,’ Carmel said.
‘You helped too,’ Lois said.
‘Ah, but I just did what I was told,’ Carmel said. ‘You did the planning and all.’
Jeff smiled. ‘Lois, your father says that life has never been the same since you deserted the ship and went on to nurse. The woman that they have in to see to your mother is also supposed to cook an evening meal and James always says she isn’t a patch on you. I know for a fact he often goes out for fish and chips when she has gone home. Anyway,’ he said, beaming around at them all, ‘you are in for a treat and I am not going to stay here and let it spoil. I just came to wish you a very merry Christmas.’
‘Thank you, Dad,’ Paul said, taking the bottles from him. He felt bad about his father, caught in the crossfire between him and his mothe
r. Lois and Chris had been to see their respective families already and taken cards and presents, but Paul had not been near his old home, though he had phoned the factory and wished both his father and brother a happy Christmas and a very prosperous new year. Lois told Carmel she didn’t blame him one bit, and Paul didn’t seem to care one way or the other, but Carmel couldn’t help feeling sorry about it all. She saw now that Paul had some guilt about it too.
‘Look, Dad,’ he began, ‘I feel really bad I haven’t been round and—;’
‘Don’t fret, son,’ Jeff said. ‘We know who is at fault here and I don’t think your mother will ever change. But there is no need for us never to see each other. Maybe we can meet for a drink a time or two. I could sign you into my club with no bother, or maybe I can come and see you here.’
‘You would always be welcome,’ Carmel said warmly. ‘In fact, we would love to have you visit.’ The others endorsed that just as earnestly.
‘Right then,’ Jeff said, a big beam lighting up his whole face, ‘I’ll get your Christmas present. I have it in the car.’
‘You have given us our Christmas presents,’ Paul said. ‘The champagne.’
‘That was just to drink and enjoy,’ Jeff said. ‘This is something different and I might need a hand with it. The box is quite hefty.’
The box was indeed quite hefty, and a few minutes later, when Paul and his father brought it in, the girls were nearly delirious with joy.
‘A wireless,’ cried Lois. ‘Oh, Uncle Jeff, aren’t you just the tops?’
‘I take it you’re pleased?’
‘Much more than pleased,’ Carmel said. ‘More like delighted.’ And, greatly daring, she stood on tiptoe and kissed Jeff on the cheek. Lois followed suit.
Jeff went quite pink and said, ‘I’ll bring presents more often if I get that sort of reaction.’
‘Thanks, Dad,’ Paul said again. ‘It really is very good of you.’
‘Well, there is great entertainment to be had from a wireless, right enough,’ Jeff said. ‘But the world is an unsettled place just now and it does no harm to keep abreast of things.’
It was as if a sudden chill fell over the room and Carmel shivered.
‘You’re cold,’ said Paul solicitously. ‘And no wonder. Between Chris and myself we have let the fire nearly go out.’ He was poking up the fire as he spoke and then placed nuggets of coal on the embers. Carmel didn’t bother telling him that it wasn’t cold made her shiver but a sudden sense of foreboding.
Chris and Lois had placed the wireless on one of the shelves at the side of the fireplace and were twiddling knobs on it.
Jeff, noting the preoccupation of the others, said quietly to Carmel, ‘How is your mother these days?’
‘Oh, grand,’ Carmel said.
‘Charming woman,’ said Jeff. ‘Quite utterly charming.’
‘I wanted to send a few toys to the children, for it is Christmas, after all,’ Carmel said, ‘but Paul convinced me that money to my mother was probably more beneficial.’ She didn’t say that what Paul had actually said was that for the children to have full bellies for once in their life would mean more.
‘I’m sure that is right,’ Jeff said. ‘Your mother would have more of an idea of what they wanted.’
Carmel thought that what her siblings wanted didn’t even enter the equation. She knew Jeff would have no concept of how they lived, but she was prevented from giving any sort of answer because Paul came forward with two glasses of champagne.
‘You must have a Christmas drink with us at least, Dad,’ he said, handing a glass to his father and one to Carmel. ‘What I do know is that in order to secure this day together we will all be working flat out over the new year, so let us all raise our glasses both to Christmas and to 1936, and all it may bring.’
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
On 20 January 1936, King George V died. Carmel remembered the old and rather dour, heavily bearded man whose pictures had been splashed all over the papers the previous May at his anniversary. Apparently, though, his son who would become Edward VIII was nothing like his father.
‘Now that is what I call handsome,’ Aileen said, one day in the hospital dining room. ‘A real man.’
There were hoots of laughter around the table. ‘Bit out of your league,’ Jane put in. ‘Anyway, he’s spoken for.’
‘You don’t mean that Wallace Simpson?’
‘Who else?’
‘Well, he’ll have to give her up now he’s the King,’ Aileen said.
‘Yeah, could you see us all accepting an American divorcee as Queen?’
‘He couldn’t marry her, could he?’ Sylvia said. ‘Even if she wasn’t an American, I mean. He couldn’t marry a divorced woman and stay King because he will be Head of the Church of England then.’
‘But the Church of England allows divorce, doesn’t it?’ Carmel said. ‘Isn’t that one of the differences between that and the Catholic Church?’
‘Ah,’ said Sylvia. ‘They might allow it, but it is frowned on a bit, isn’t it? I mean, it isn’t common or anything, and you can’t have the head of the whole caboodle marrying a divorced woman.’
‘Yeah, it would be like taking the mickey,’ Jane said in agreement.
‘So,’ Lois said to Aileen with a smile, ‘there is an opening, after all.’
‘Yeah, hope for you yet,’ another nurse put in, and there was laughter before the nurses dispersed and went to their respective wards.
Paul, however, was less concerned about the King than he was about Germany and its Chancellor, Adolf Hitler. Chris was just as bad, and they would often discuss things round the table on the rare occasions they could eat together.
Carmel couldn’t quite understand their concern. ‘Why should we care what is happening in Germany?’
‘Sometimes we are forced to care,’ Paul said.
‘Paul, some of the people here worry themselves silly about getting enough to eat for themselves and their families,’ Carmel said. ‘That’s the people I care about. Let Germany sort out her own problems. We have too many of our own to interfere, even if we wanted to.’
‘Yes, but some of the tales coming out of there are so incredible…well, they are almost unbelievable,’ Chris said. ‘I mean, I heard that Jews are being ousted from their jobs and some are just disappearing altogether. And I wish the Olympic Games were anywhere but Berlin this year.’
‘It will be a farce, just like the Winter Olympics Hitler held in Bavaria in February, I bet,’ Paul said.
‘Yeah,’ Chris said. ‘Put on to promote the idea of the master race’s superiority in everything.’
‘Master race?’ Lois repeated. ‘What’s that when it’s at home?’
‘Hitler’s mad on promoting the Aryan race, tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed and athletic,’ Chris said.
‘Oh, so you’re all right, Paul,’ Lois said. ‘You and this Herr Hitler bloke could be the best of buddies.’
‘Huh, I don’t think so,’ Paul said, ‘I’m more particular about the people I choose as friends. And this stuff about an Aryan master race is just crazy.’
‘Yeah,’ said Chris, ‘but what is even crazier is the fact that the man proposing this master race is a shrimp himself—an Austrian by birth, black-haired and brown-eyed, and it seems no one in Germany has seen the anomaly of that.’
‘All right,’ Carmel said. ‘So the man is an idiot, but he can’t be any threat to us, can he? I mean, what have we ever done to him?’
‘Nothing, but that might not save us,’ Paul said.
Just before the Olympic Games began, civil war broke out in Spain in early July and the elected government found themselves fighting a group called Fascists.
‘They are no better that the German Nazis,’ Paul said.
It seemed Paul was right because, almost from the first, Germany sided with the dictator Franco, trying to oust the government. The British government elected not to get involved, which Carmel thought a very sensible thing. Spain was a long way awa
y and what was happening there had nothing to do with them. She couldn’t understand the British men who took themselves off to fight for the Spanish government.
‘If they have enough energy to fight, then they should fight the poverty here first,’ she told Paul fiercely a couple of days later. ‘We had an old woman brought in today after she collapsed on the street. She was like a skeleton, virtually starved to death, so far gone that when we tried to get sustenance into her, her stomach couldn’t take it. Think of that in this day and age. Daily I fight the illnesses often brought about by deprivation and poverty of our own people. It’s disgraceful the way some people have to live.’
There really was no reply to what Carmel said. Britain was in dire straits and no one knew more about that than the four young people in the house, who were dealing, in the main, with the city’s poor.
Just a few days later, as Paul and Chris prophesied, Hitler showed his racial policies to the world when an African American won four gold medals over Germany’s white Aryan athlete Lutz Long, and Hitler refused to shake the winner’s hand or place the medals around his neck, because he regarded the victor as racially inferior.
‘Shouldn’t have surprised anyone, really,’ Paul said. ‘What d’you think Hitler Youth is? Oh, the ideals are good, instilling national pride—and they tell them all about their culture, teach them nationalistic songs, taking them away to camp—but underneath all the fun are far more sinister motives. I mean, it isn’t like the Boy Scouts here, for example.’
‘I’ve heard that too,’ Chris said. ‘Maybe, though, the idea of national pride isn’t a bad one in itself.’
‘I dare say it isn’t—;’ Paul began.
But Carmel cut across him, ‘I would say it is very hard to feel pride in a country whose policies mean that you and yours are nearly starving to death and that no one seems to care enough to even try and find a solution. It won’t go away on its own.’
Carmel, it seemed, wasn’t the only one to think that something should be done. In early October two hundred men marched from Jarrow in the North-East, where unemployment was running at seventy percent, to London. They carried a petition with over eleven thousand signatures in an effort to bring their plight to the government’s notice. There was a picture of them all in the paper, assembled behind the second-hand bus that was carrying all their cooking equipment, and the whole thing caught the imagination of the population.
