by S Block
It isn’t ideal, but would it be so awful? Neither Nick nor Annie would ever know. Fighting it only seems to aggravate the situation. The secret would be mine alone. And I’m good with secrets. I’m very good with them. As long as I never call out her name when I’m in bed with him – and I’ve never been in the habit of calling out my lovers’ names during the act. Not even when they’ve deserved some kind of vocal accolade. The truth is . . . I have strong feelings towards each of them. But I’m married, and to all intents and purposes that – and Nick – has to take precedence over everything – and everyone – else. Eventually, I’m sure I’ll simply stop thinking about her altogether.
‘I love you so much,’ Nick whispered, kissing her neck. She could feel him becoming hard again. Teresa smiled, and said, ‘I love you too. With all my heart.’
Nick began to kiss her breasts. Teresa opened her eyes to give Nick her full attention, then lay back and thought of England, Scotland and Wales.
And for just a fleeting moment, Annie . . .
Chapter 30
Who am I? I am a middle-aged woman who lives in a small village in Cheshire. I live with my husband and – for the moment – with another woman who has taken us in after our house was recently destroyed. We have lived in this village for nearly fourteen years, since 1926. Before that we lived in Manchester. At first, it was difficult adjusting to rural life. The pace of everything is definitely slower than in a city, and it’s strange at first to realise that you’re seeing the same faces day after day, but you get used to that, and the smells, which were difficult to begin with but which soon became familiar and, in some way, reassuringly specific. A city has no distinct smell. It could be anywhere. But as soon as I approach my village I know where I am before having to see a single house.
From one day to the next I look after my husband, who I met at a literary event following the publication of his first novel. At that time, I was a secretary at a small publishing house, with ambitions to become a book editor, though that won’t happen now. Some days I feel extremely sad about what I will never be. I adore literature and have quite good taste, if I say so myself. But there’s nothing I can do about it. What’s done is done.
My husband is very particular about noise in the house while he’s working, which means I have to be very quiet so as not to disturb him. I can’t put on the wireless, for example. He doesn’t like music or voices in the house. So I am unable to have friends over for a cup of tea and a chat. I’m not to disturb him in any way, except when he calls for me to make him something to eat or drink.
If I’m perfectly honest, he eats like a pig. I’d never dare say it to his face but it disgusts me. He doesn’t so much eat the food I’ve made for him as attack it, cutting and slashing it into pieces with his knife and fork and then putting as much of it into his mouth at a time as he can so it won’t take long to finish. His expression never changes to surprise or even mild enjoyment when he eats, but he does make little grunting noises of appreciation.
I hate the sound his cutlery makes on his plate, metal on china. Sometimes, in his haste to be done with meals, he bashes and scrapes the plate so hard with his knife and fork I think he’s going to crack it. It’s not dissimilar to his approach to most aspects of his life and his work, which he bashes out on his typewriter with seemingly little care for the consequences. When he finishes his meals he pushes the plate away and gets up from the table and goes back into his room to continue his work. I eat in peace when he’s gone from the kitchen.
Most of my day is taken up with washing and cleaning and cooking. A bit of shopping. It’s not a very interesting life. I read when I have time. I love the contemporary fiction I find in the mobile library that comes to the village once a month. My husband doesn’t like me to read ‘literary’ books about female characters who think too much about their lives. I think he believes they’ll give me ideas, without realising I already have ideas that he’s never asked me about. He recently told me he was going to find me ‘better’ books to read, ones with ‘proper stories’. We had an argument over it. In the end I had to let him give me a list of books he was happy for me to take out. But I also took out three books of my own choosing, which I’ve hidden with my underwear. It’s a little like living under siege, in that I have to keep the things I really treasure away from him, or suffer the consequences.
If I were to say I hate my life I think it would be difficult for someone else to understand. But I am quite sure that I do hate it. I am utterly trapped in a marriage to a man I have come to loathe, who seems to loathe me back in equal measure. He blames me for his lack of success since his first novel, but I realised quite early on that he was an author who more or less only had one book in him. I thought he might develop into a really very good writer. Instead, he has merely developed into a quick one, albeit hard-working. This second novel is one he’s managed to squeeze out because he was fortuitously posted to Dunkirk at precisely the right time to give him a story to tell. It seemed opportunistic to me, with the war still raging, and people dying left, right and centre. In poor taste, though his publisher clearly doesn’t think so.
My husband is a bully and I sometimes think I haven’t stood up to him enough in the past. He sometimes hits me. I can see his anger rising and I know I’m going to cop it. There’s nothing I can do. I can’t even run because he’s faster than I am, even with an injured leg. I try and placate him but it seldom works. The shocking thing is I’ve grown accustomed to it now. I didn’t realise this until I met another man while my husband was away in France.
The ‘other man’ treated me with great kindness and respect, and we fell in love. I felt so enormously happy with him. He made me feel completely different about myself, which I suppose is what love is, isn’t it? It transforms us into happy, better people. Anything less isn’t love. It can’t be, by definition. He was very caring and attentive and loving. We made love, and it was completely different to the mechanical relations I have with my husband.
We had started to talk of a future together, after the war. I said I would leave my husband for him and we could move away and live together as man and wife. But he was called away suddenly, and I don’t know if I shall ever see him again. He could be anywhere now. I’ve read that Churchill ordered some British troops in North Africa to be sent to Greece. Is he in North Africa? If so, will he now be on his way to Greece? I’ve no idea. Like so many women, I find myself wondering each minute of each day if the man I love is safe.
I don’t think I’ve ever hated another human being in my life before this point, but there are two I hate now with a fierce passion. My husband, and myself. Him for his constant control over my life – what we eat, where I go, who I can be friends with – his constant insults and use of violence. And me, for staying.
I don’t think a day goes by that I don’t wish my husband had been killed in France. Or one when I don’t wish I was with the ‘other man’.
If it wasn’t for the WI I think I would go mad. It angers my husband no end that I spend time on WI business as it’s time away from looking after him. He thinks the WI is stupid, largely because he thinks most women are stupid. He thinks the WI is full of silly women making up activities for themselves because they’re bored. I have tried to explain that we do so much more than what he calls ‘idiotic activities’ but he doesn’t listen or understand how important even these ‘silly’ activities are to us all. A dance or a cake or floral competition, or even a game of ‘guess the ankle’, helps us let our hair down and enjoy ourselves at the end of a long month – which we need to be able to do now more than ever.
But the reality is that the activities he thinks are frivolous and pointless are just one aspect of the WI. In fact, the organisation does a tremendous amount of serious work in the countryside for countrywomen, and for the country as a whole. It was one of the first organisations the Ministry of War contacted when the government realised war with Hitler was inevitable. All us ‘silly women’ were mobilised into prese
rving fruit to ensure the country had sufficient calories to see it through the Atlantic blockades the Germans would impose. We also raise money for ambulances in areas suffering from bombing, and make a wide range of warm clothing for our young men serving overseas in every branch of the armed forces. And more recently, when the war came to the village in a very shocking way and wiped out two houses, it was the WI that rehoused people and refurnished properties and found clothes and support for those involved who had lost everything. It was the WI that enabled our village surgery to get back on its feet within two weeks of being flattened. In my experience, men often like to sit around talking about doing great things, but it’s the women who get on and do them. If I couldn’t attend my WI meeting once a month I don’t know what I might do.
As this is a completely anonymous account I can write that I once considered killing my husband. It was a very bad time. I was feeling exceedingly low. He had beaten me quite severely for something, I can’t remember what, and I thought he was likely to kill me if he came at me again. No one in the village knew what happened behind our front door, just as I have no idea what happens behind theirs. A friend of mine is the wife of our local butcher, so one evening I asked how they killed various animals. She was a little taken aback by the question at first, but I am our WI’s ‘Talks Sec’ and told her I was thinking about asking her to give a talk on butchery and wanted to hear more about it. I learned so much. I decided my best bet was to use a hammer. I took my husband’s and hid it under the mattress on my side of the bed. Then I waited until he fell asleep and slowly took the hammer out and got out of bed and tiptoed over to his side. I stood over him with the hammer in my hand—
Pat stopped writing the instant she heard footsteps on the stairs outside the small spare bedroom Joyce had allocated to them. In a single movement, Pat buried the paper and pens she was using to write her first Mass Observation report under her side of the mattress. She then lay on top of the bed, and pretended to be asleep.
After a few seconds, she realised the footsteps had been Joyce’s not Bob’s, and opened her eyes, releasing an almost silent sigh of relief.
In future, respond just like that. Hide everything at the first sound of someone approaching – until you know it’s safe. You can’t take any chances. It’s how he found out about Marek. We weren’t vigilant enough.
Pat lay on the bed, thinking of her Czech lover, falling back into the warm habit of wondering where he might now be, and if he ever thought of her, as she did him. Until now, rerunning her memories of the Czech captain provided her only respite from Bob.
I was loved. You may have destroyed it, but you cannot take the fact of its existence from me.
But now, in place of unanswerable questions about Marek that were driving her slowly to distraction, Pat had secret Mass Observation reports into which she could discharge any thought or anxiety she wanted, without fear or censure.
If I wanted, I could write that I had killed Bob, and got away with his murder scot-free.
She was tempted to free herself from Bob in fiction as she was unable to in life.
But . . . this is meant to be an accurate account of things. If I make things up as and when I feel like it, how can my report stand as a truthful, historical record? What kind of witness would that make me? Tell the truth. Always. Just tell the truth. I didn’t kill Bob. I’m not sure I’m capable of murder, not even if I consider it to be in self-defence. But until one finds oneself in that situation it’s impossible to say what one is capable of. We both live to fight another day . . .
Chapter 31
When Frances had challenged Joyce for the Chair of Great Paxford’s WI a year earlier, she did so on a platform of wanting to keep the branch open during the war. Joyce had wanted to mothball it until hostilities came to an end, whenever that might be, arguing that the women of Great Paxford would have more urgent matters to attend to than ‘WI business’. Frances couldn’t have disagreed more. She remembered from the Great War how important it was for women to provide support and distraction for one another when their men went to fight.
Frances had won a huge mandate from a membership tired of being treated like sheep by Joyce. She immediately encouraged women who had been previously put off joining by Joyce to become new members, and they had joined in droves.
Looking at their faces now, Frances couldn’t be more pleased with the new membership.
Steph Farrow would never have considered joining under Joyce. I’ve made Steph – and working women like her – feel welcome. And they’ve contributed so much. And gained so much. Look at Steph herself. When the WI turned the cricket pitch into an allotment to grow food, it was Steph who supplied most of the equipment, and drew up a plan for what and where to plant. All the while running the farm while her husband Stan’s away fighting. You can see in Steph’s face every time she walks through the door of the village hall – she feels equal to anyone. Everyone loves her clear thinking and antipathy towards waffle, and what her husband apparently likes to call ‘utter bollocks’.
Consequently, when Steph approached Frances in town to discuss the influx of people into the area at nightfall from Liverpool and Crewe, Frances listened very carefully indeed.
Steph reported that incomers coming to shelter from nightly bombardment from the Luftwaffe were similar to the ‘trekkers’ in the south she’d heard described in wireless bulletins – thousands who literally trekked on foot from London every night into the surrounding countryside to avoid being caught in the Blitz. Since her first sighting of them on the tractor with her son, Little Stan, a few weeks ago, Steph had seen them grow in number at night in the countryside around Great Paxford. She had seen some camping in her own fields, the light from small campfires visible from her bedroom window.
‘I’m not happy about it ’cause they’re trespassing,’ said Steph. ‘But I don’t know what to do ’cause I understand why they’ve come. A lot of the farmers feel the same. So far, they haven’t given any trouble. But more come all the time. They don’t know how things work round here. There’s a lot of fires being lit on dry ground, for example. All it takes is a spark to jump to a barn and you could lose a farm without much problem. Lot of unprotected livestock too. I’ve heard reports of farmers seeing children walking up to cows and sheep like they’re tame. Which they’re not. We haven’t seen animals taken for meat yet, but a lot of us think it’s only a matter of time. We don’t have the police we did ’cause so many have joined up, so who knows what could happen—’
‘And then there’s the other thing!’ interrupted Mrs Talbot, a thin and angular woman, with small eyes, a large nose in the shape of a small tomahawk, and a small head on a scrawny, red neck, a woman perfectly at ease with interrupting someone else’s private conversation. In look and demeanour, she resembled an affronted chicken, ready to peck or claw someone’s eyes out at the slightest provocation.
‘Other thing?’ asked Frances. ‘What other thing?’
‘Some of them are darkies.’
‘So?’
‘They have different ways to us, don’t they?’
‘Do they?’ said Frances. ‘I honestly wouldn’t know.’
‘They might see chickens in a field and think, “Thanks very much, free food.”’
Frances looked at Mrs Talbot for a moment.
‘They might, I suppose, Mrs Talbot. But we hear no accounts of them doing that in Liverpool, where they live perfectly peacefully alongside everyone else, so why should we fear it here?’
‘They might think things’re more relaxed out here.’
‘I’m sure they are perfectly civilised people, Mrs Talbot. And like civilised people everywhere, they are most likely to do what everyone else is doing.’
‘You say that but we don’t know, do we?’
‘Well, if we look at how they behave where they live, we arguably do know. And where they live they behave like everyone else.’
‘People are scared – that’s all I’m saying.’
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sp; ‘But of what, Mrs Talbot? Something real and tangible, based on actual evidence? Or are they simply scared because of their skin colour, and that alone?’
‘They come from savages, Frances. We all know it.’
‘You listen to the wireless a great deal, don’t you, Mrs Talbot?’
‘Yes.’
‘You follow the war very closely.’
‘I keep abreast of the news.’
‘Do you honestly believe savagery is limited to the black races?’
Mrs Talbot looked at Frances, flummoxed by the philosophical turn of the conversation.
‘Well . . . ’
‘As far as I know, no “darkie” has ever dropped bombs on a civilian population, as Hitler did at Guernica, and now across Europe.’
It was this conversation that had persuaded Frances to call a committee meeting at her house, to discuss any friction that might arise from the increasing numbers of these trekkers coming into the area around the village. That and, if she were completely honest, the opportunity to organise a distraction from her anxiety over Noah’s progress at his new school – not helped by the fact that she hadn’t heard from the boy since he left. She missed him terribly, and thought about Noah a very great deal. She might have agreed to curtail her daily telephone calls to the school to check how well he was fitting in, but this didn’t mean her anxiety was any less. But the headmaster had promised to call if there were any causes for concern, and as yet there had been none. Realising she’d once again let her mind wander to Noah, Frances dragged her thoughts back to the matter at hand.
Strictly speaking, dealing with trekkers was within the purview of the parish council rather than the WI. However, the parish council was riddled with local pompous retired men who, for want of anything better to do, loved playing ‘local politics’ – two words that sent a shiver of horror trickling down Frances’s spine. The parish council was notoriously slow to react with any coherence or very much at all, except issues surrounding ‘fishing rights’ on local rivers. By the time it ever managed to get to grips with the trekker situation things could already have begun to spiral out of control. Frances thought it prescient for the WI to be prepared with possible ideas for tackling trouble before it occurred.
