The Hills and the Valley

by Janet Tanner

  As always on occasions such as this Mrs Milsom had excelled herself and in spite of the shortages the meal was superb – Barbara found herself wondering how the family were going to manage with their rations for the remainder of the week. But doing justice to it was an impossibility. The food stuck in her throat and she felt faintly sick. Each time her eyes met Huw’s she tried to smile, but the clock on the mantelshelf was ticking the minutes away and the despair gathered within her until it was almost akin to panic.

  They were talking but the conversation seemed to spiral over her head.

  ‘I don’t know how much longer I shall be flying special ops,’ Huw was saying in answer to a question Ralph had asked him. ‘The more of France that is liberated the less need there will be for my brand of specialised pick-ups. I could end up doing nothing more exciting than transport services – and maybe a parachute drop or two over Germany if I’m lucky.’

  His words penetrated through to her and Barbara looked at him sharply. Was this how the dangers of war had affected Huw? Would he ever be able to settle to a normal life again or would he continually seek the thrill of danger to set adrenalin pumping like a drug through his veins?

  When Mrs Milsom had removed the dishes they sat for a while around the table, then moved to the drawing-room. Barbara sat beside Huw on the low comfortable settee, aching to touch him yet knowing she must not. Whatever their relationship in private, however aware the others were of it, in public propriety must be maintained.

  At last Ralph moved.

  ‘I don’t want to break up this party but I’m afraid I must. It’s a working day tomorrow.’

  Barbara stood up. Her limbs felt like lead. At least Huw was going to drive her home in Amy’s car (his own had no petrol in it though it was still in the garage under wraps) and they would have that little time together. But on the short journey she could not bring herself to speak. If she did she was quite certain she would break down altogether.

  Huw turned into the drive of Hillsbridge House. Behind the blackout it looked dark and unfriendly against the deep violet of the sky. He pulled into the yard at the side of the house, well out of view of those blacked-out windows, and turned off the engine.

  ‘Oh Barbara, I wish I could take you with me.’

  ‘I wish you could.’

  Such ordinary words, filled with so much emotion.

  He reached for her and they were in each other’s arms, kissing, clinging, each unwilling to let the other go.

  ‘You will write?’

  ‘Try to stop me! And you will tell Marcus – separate rooms?’

  ‘I will, I promise. I couldn’t bear it now if he …’

  ‘Oh Barbara, I love you.’

  ‘I love you.’

  More kisses. More caresses, increasingly frantic.

  ‘I want you!’

  ‘We can’t! Not here!’

  ‘There’s nobody about.’

  ‘No!’ But they did. It was awkward and fumbled, yet equally as loving as any of their unions.

  Afterwards she said: ‘I’ll have to go.’

  ‘You can’t. I won’t let you.’

  ‘I have to!’ Her panic had a new dimension now, a dark fear she could not explain. At last he released her.

  ‘Go on then.’

  ‘Huw …’

  ‘Go on, quickly, before I change my mind, start this car and get the hell out of it taking you with me.’

  ‘Huw …’

  ‘For God’s sake, Barbara, go!’

  She went, kissing him one last time. He waited until he saw her open the door of the house then drove away. She watched his tail lights disappear down the tree-lined drive and the tears ran unchecked down her face. But they did nothing to ease the bleakness in her heart. When she could no longer see the lights or hear the engine she went in, shutting the door behind her.

  There was no sound from any of the downstairs rooms. The Spindlers had all retired to bed. She crept upstairs, hoping Marcus was asleep. More darkness. But when she opened the door of their room and entered stealthily the light snapped on.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’

  He was standing by the window and the blackout curtain was slightly awry. His hair was a little tousled and he was wearing his silk dressing gown. Barbara’s eyes flicked to the bed; the covers were thrown back untidily as if he had already been in bed and jumped up hastily to look out of the window – when he heard the engine of the car, perhaps? Hot colour flooded her cheeks and automatically her hands flew to check the buttons of her dress and pat her hair into place.

  It was a mistake. She saw his eyes narrow.

  ‘We stayed talking. There was such a lot to say since it’s Huw’s last night.’ She knew she was babbling.

  ‘You were with him.’

  ‘He brought me home, yes.’ No point denying it. ‘Someone had to. You wouldn’t expect me to walk.’

  ‘You’ve been out there with him close on an hour.’

  ‘Oh surely not!’

  ‘You think I don’t know? I’ve been here watching and waiting. You must have had a hell of a lot to say!’

  ‘We did – I told you …’

  He came towards her. His eyes were bright with the fever she had grown to fear. She took a step backwards but his hand shot out, gripping her arm.

  ‘If you let him touch you, I’ll kill you!’

  ‘Marcus – please – you’re hurting me!’

  ‘And I’ll hurt you more before we’re through. You are my wife and don’t you forget it!’ His hand was a vice on her arm; still holding her fast he ripped open her blouse. She sobbed.

  ‘Marcus! Stop it!’

  He ignored her, freeing one breast from its covering of silk and lace. She sobbed again as he pushed her back towards the bed.

  ‘Marcus!’

  He was on top of her now, one hand covering her mouth to stop her cry. Her skirt he bunched up, tearing at her panties. She struggled, knowing it was useless but desperate to stop him. She couldn’t let him take her now, with the touch of Huw’s body still on hers. His weight was squeezing the breath out of her, his knee forcing her legs apart. As he entered her she threw back her head, closing her eyes tightly, her lips parted in a silent scream. He moved in her roughly, his body tearing at her tender membranes, still moist thankfully from her time with Huw, and she lay submissive now, knowing there was no point in resisting further.

  When it was over she lay feeling used and sore. Then her anger began, creeping slowly through her, until it built to a crescendo. She jumped up, pulling her torn dress round her and facing him with fire in her eyes.

  ‘How dare you!’ she blazed. ‘How dare you do this to me?’

  ‘I’m your husband!’

  ‘Yes, God help me, you are! But I won’t be used like this. Not ever again. I want my own room. With a lock on the door. If you won’t give it to me, I’m leaving you!’

  His supremacy had been expended along with his twisted lust. He looked like a frightened small boy.

  ‘Barbara …’

  ‘I mean it!’ she said. ‘I won’t sleep with you any more, Marcus.’ She turned her back on him, collecting her hairbrush from the dressing table, her nightdress in its case from the pillow. ‘For tonight I’ll sleep in Hope’s room. After that you can work something out. This is a big house. There are plenty of rooms in this wing. Deny me one of them and I leave.’

  ‘Please …’ He was crying now. She looked at him scornfully.

  ‘I don’t care what you tell your mother and father, or if you tell them at all. But as far as I am concerned, Marcus, our marriage is over. Do you understand?’

  She swept into Hope’s room. Miraculously, the child was still sleeping peacefully, one thumb in her mouth. Barbara leaned over her protectively for a moment, half expecting Marcus to follow her. He did not. She collapsed onto the bed that had been provided for the nanny they had never employed, her anger dying once more into despair, and wept as if her heart would break.

>   Chapter Twenty-eight

  If the first five years of the war had dragged by interminably the last months seemed like a lifetime. Everyone had assumed that once a successful invasion had been launched in France, the Third Reich and its allies would collapse. France had been liberated, it was true, but as Christmas approached things dragged on with the boys still in uniform, the Japanese fighting for their lives and their prisoners as far from being freed as ever.

  At the beginning of December the Home Guard were stood down in a grand Final Parade, when two hundred out of the two hundred and sixty-four members presented themselves for a final march through Hillsbridge. ‘We shall be forming an Old Comrades Association,’ Ralph told Amy after she had watched, moist-eyed. ‘It’s important that we keep all the old ties intact when things get back to normal.’

  One family, however, approached Christmas in a happy mood. Margaret and Harry had set the wheels in motion to formally adopt Marie and for the first time since she had grown to love the little girl, Margaret felt aglow of security and happiness as she pinned up the paper chains Marie had glued together and wrapped parcels in sheets of wrapping paper she had saved from last year and carefully ironed to remove the creases.

  Thankfully, Marie seemed to have recovered from her ordeal very well. She had settled back into the bedroom she had once shared with Elaine with remarkably little fuss and though she had become a little tearful when the Christmas decorations came out and she saw the squashed trimmings she and Elaine had made the previous year, Margaret never once heard her cry for her mother.

  In a way, Margaret supposed, it was as if she had lost her at the beginning of the war when they had been evacuated; the brief reappearance of Mrs Cooper had been a little like a dream to the child whose roots now seemed to be firmly entrenched in Hillsbridge.

  As always the Hall clan gathered at Greenslade Terrace for tea on Christmas Day, though for the first time ever Charlotte had been persuaded not to cook her own Christmas dinner but to go instead to Margaret and Harry’s. Theirs had been only one of a number of invitations, which she had turned down for various reasons.

  Jack and Stella had asked her to stay with them at Minehead over the holiday but she had not wanted to go so far away from the rest of the family even though they had all thought the change would do her good; Dolly’s house was too far for her to walk back in the afternoon in time to prepare the family tea she was determined to put on as usual, since Victor had no transport except for his trusty bicycle; and she could not face the thought of waiting until the evening for her main meal as she would have had to do if she had gone to Amy’s. So, instead, she accepted the invitation to spend the first part of the day with Harry and Margaret, who were also entertaining Margaret’s mother, Gussie. The two women had never been close, in spite of their relationship by marriage, but since they were both now widowed they formed a slightly awkward alliance, sitting together on the front room settee to chat whilst Margaret prepared lunch, sipping the sweet sherry that Harry poured for them and taking it in turns to help Marie crochet with the brightly coloured oddments of cotton which Father Christmas had left for her in her stocking.

  Lunch and the ritual of listening to the King’s Speech over, it was time for Charlotte to go home and prepare for her guests. The plan had been for Gussie, Margaret and Harry to spend the remainder of the day at Margaret’s house, but by this time Charlotte and Gussie were getting along so well that she and the others were readily persuaded to join the gathering at Greenslade Terrace.

  There was method in Charlotte’s madness. She wanted the house to be as full as was humanly possible in order to help her through this first Christmas without James. That morning, waking for the first time to find herself quite alone in the house on Christmas morning, she had felt more lonely and vulnerable than ever before, even in the early days after James’s death, and the carols that were being played when she tuned in on her wireless and the shrieks of children along the Ranks as they showed off their presents to one another only served to heighten the feeling of isolation. She had wept quietly over her cup of morning tea, remembering the days when her own house had been full of love and laughter, impatient with her own self-pity, yet quite unable to stop the tears.

  The loneliness had ebbed a little in the warmth and companionship at Margaret’s house but once back in Greenslade Terrace it returned once more, in spite of the arrival of Dolly and Victor with Noel, whose birthday it was, and who was still as boisterous as if he were eight instead of eighteen, Jim, Sarah and May with May’s two little terrors and the Porter contingent. No matter how many of them there were in the house, they could not fill the gap left by dear quiet James; though he had seldom contributed more than a word or two to the proceedings his absence was a raw wound, a void in Charlotte’s heart which she knew would never be filled. And there were other gaps, too – Alec, Fred and Bob, and Huw and Barbara, besides Jack and Stella and Ted and Rosa whose absence, though customary now, was still a cause for regret.

  ‘If they were all here we’d never get into the house!’ Charlotte thought with a wry smile as she sliced Christmas cake, made from the special wartime recipe, but that did not stop her from thinking how wonderful it would be to have all her family under one roof.

  Ah well, perhaps next year …

  Perhaps, by next year the war would be over and all the wanderers returned at least, safe and well, please God …

  Charlotte, though once a staunch chapel-goer, was not a woman who often prayed. But she prayed now, silently and fervently, that soon this terrible ever-lasting war would end and they would all be together again.

  The end came haltingly, not with one great final moment of glory, but in a series of death-throes for Hitler’s Germany and the regime which had threatened the whole of the civilised world.

  For a week before the end finally came the wireless was predicting victory, but the whole country was too war-weary and worn down to jump for joy as it had at the end of the Great War. The pictures of Mussolini and his mistress hanging upside down on a Milan lampbracket after being shot by Communist partisans caused a mild stir when they appeared in the newspapers and Charlotte, amongst others, branded the display of the mistress’s voluminous undergarments as disgusting. But since Italy had been out of the war now for almost two years it was not an event of any great significance.

  Much more heartening was the news, two days later, that Hitler and Eva Braun, whom he had married the previous day, had killed themselves in Hitler’s bunker and that their bodies had been burnt in the yard outside. But still the end did not come for there was a new name to be reckoned with – one which few people had heard before – Admiral Doenitz. Although he made an attempt to end the war on the western front whilst continuing the fight against the Russians, this proposal was rejected and so for more confusing days the news remained inconclusive.

  ‘I don’t know, they seem to be enjoying themselves!’ Stanley Bristow remarked in the bar of the Miners Arms. ‘Would’st think they’d be only too pleased to end it, wouldn’t’ee? But no. They’ve still got to hang on to their little bit of power.’

  It was a sentiment echoed wholeheartedly by the other men.

  ‘I’m going to tell’ee some’ut,’ Stanley went on. ‘I blame Churchill meself. He’s a warmonger, al’us was.’

  There was a moment’s shocked silence. To criticise Winnie out loud was to commit a heresy of the worst kind. But privately many of them agreed. All very well to have a leader of Winnie’s stature to lead them into battle. Now all any of them wanted was a bit of peace.

  ‘T’wouldn’t surprise me if Atlee don’t get in next time,’ Walter Brixey said. ‘One thing’s for sure – I shall be voting for’im.’

  The others nodded. But that was no ‘turn up for the books’, as Walter might have phrased it. Hillsbridge miners were Labour to a man and had been from the moment the party had risen from obscurity.

  On the evening of 7th May, Londoners at least decided they had waited long enough.
With the announcement of Victory in England imminent, thousands converged on the West End and the sky which had once been lit up by the Blitz glowed red for victory as bonfires blazed throughout the capital, rockets streaked into the sky and a pile of straw filled with thunder-flashes salvaged from some military dump cracked and spurted darts of flame. But though London might have gone mad with uncontrollable joy, the more conservative Hillsbridge waited for the official announcement before joining in the celebrations.

  It came at 3 p.m. the following day.

  Charlotte heard it in Peggy Yelling’s kitchen where they and Colwyn, who had abandoned work for the day and shut up the shed where he carried on his boot-mending business, were gathered around Peggy’s wireless set. As the stentorian voice boomed out above the crackling air waves there was a hush in the kitchen, broken only by the fall of the coals in Peggy’s fire.

  ‘Yesterday morning at 2.41, at General Eisenhower’s Headquarters, General Jodl, representative of the German High Command and of Grand Admiral Doenitz, designated head of the German State, signed an act of unconditional surrender of all German land, sea and air forces in Europe to the Allied Expeditionary Force and simultaneously to the Soviet High Command.’

  ‘What’s he say?’ Colwyn, who had been slightly deafened in the trenches in the Great War, enquired, and the others shushed him to silence, straining to hear every word. Only as it came to an end with the stirring words: ‘Advance Britannia! Long live the cause of freedom! God Save the King!’ did they break into uninhibited cheers.

  ‘It’s over, Lotty! It’s over!’

  ‘Oh Peg, thank the Lord!’

  ‘It’s over! Colwyn, see if there’s a drop of sherry left over from Christmas in the sideboard. I’m sure we didn’t finish it all. This calls for a celebration if anything does!’

  The sherry was found, the glasses carefully dusted out and they were drinking a toast to victory when there was a knock on the door, which was then immediately opened before Peg could reach it.

  ‘Have you heard the news? Were you listening to the wireless?’ It was Molly Clements, Walter’s wife. She was invited in and another glass dusted out and filled.