Keep the Home Fires Burning

by Anne Bennett

  However, the trickle of Americans that he remembered arriving in Birmingham when he joined the army had turned into a positive tide by October. They swarmed all over the dance floor, far too many for Richard’s liking, and he might as well have been invisible because most of the girls ignored him in favour of the American soldiers. He spent most of the evening propping up the bar feeling thoroughly miserable and frustrated.

  ‘I don’t know what the attraction of them is,’ Richard said to his mother the following day.

  ‘Don’t you?’ Marion said. ‘Maybe that’s because you’re not a young girl, deprived of the company of young men for a very long time. And then along come Americans, with their silver tongues and money to flash about, and unheard of luxuries like nylons and chocolate. Is it any wonder they like them?’

  ‘But the way they dance!’ Richard cried. ‘Mom, it’s disgusting at times. I mean, I’ve seen jitterbugging, even done it myself, but not the way they do. They swing the girls round so wildly some of the skirts billow out and you can see their underwear, or lift them in the air, which has the same effect, or shoot them through their legs. Sarah’s as bad as any of them.’

  Marion hid her smile because she knew what was eating Richard and that was the green-eyed monster. She knew all about the American-style jitterbugging because the girls had described it to her. She wasn’t worried what they got up to in a crowded ballroom in front of plenty of other people, it was when young people were alone in the blackout that temptation sometimes overcame them. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust Sarah ? she knew right from wrong; they all did – but she had been young herself once. At the moment their passion was for dancing and they went out together and came back together, and that was how Marion liked it.

  ‘The men at camp think there are three things wrong with the Americans,’ Richard said.

  ‘Just three?’

  ‘That’s all,’ Richard said. ‘They’re oversexed, overpaid and over here.’

  Marion laughed, but she had no wish to argue. She knew that this was probably Richard’s embarkation leave and she wanted no bad feeling between them. She also wanted him to enjoy his few days at home and so she told Sarah how he felt, and Sarah told the others. They all agreed he had a point for he had been like a spare dinner at the dance. Violet felt particularly bad about that, for she knew he had really wanted to dance with her. So they went out of their way to make a fuss of Richard and took him off to the pictures a couple of times so that all in all he enjoyed his leave.

  Saying goodbye to Richard this time was more poignant. Marion hugged him tight and knew she would worry about him every minute he was away. Sarah hugged him hard, and the twins tried to conquer their tears but didn’t quite succeed. Richard kissed them both before turning to Peggy and Violet.

  Violet put her arms around him and kissed him on the lips. ‘Look after yourself,’ she said, her voice husky with unshed tears.

  Richard held on to her hands as they pulled apart. ‘Write to me, Vi?’ he pleaded.

  So that’s the way the wind blows, Marion thought, as Violet looked into the eyes of the boy become man and nodded.

  ‘Just as a friend? No strings attached?’

  ‘Anyway you want it,’ Richard said. ‘Will you do it?’

  Violet gave a brief nod and Richard, a big smile on his face, kissed her on the cheek. He stopped to wave to them all at the gate and then strode down the street with a lighter heart because Violet had agreed to write to him.

  The wintry weather took hold in the city as Christmas approached. Marion and Polly, now they had mastered knitting, began attending a dressmaking course in one of the classrooms at nearby Ettington Road School. It was, Polly remembered, their mother’s treadle sewing machine that they had made the blackout curtains on. Eddie had no use for it, so Pat and a few of his neighbours brought the heavy machine from Yates Street to Marion’s house balanced on a wheelbarrow.

  Just before Christmas, Sarah decided to make a patchwork blouse using all the scraps of material from a pattern she had seen advertised in Home Notes. In her letters to Sam she told him about it and how difficult she was finding it, but that she was determined to finish it in time to wear on Christmas Day. His replies were full of encouragement.

  On Christmas Eve she received a package much smaller than the one he had sent the previous year and again she was on tenterhooks to know what was inside it.

  The next day after Mass, Sarah, wearing her patchwork blouse and a navy skirt adapted from one her mother had bought at the jumble sale, got Sam’s parcel from the sideboard where she had left it the previous day. All eyes were on her as she broke through the sealing wax and undid the string. There was a small box inside and when she opened that she gasped in amazement because curled around a pad of silk was a beautiful silver pendant set with a blue opal stone, her birthstone. It was easily the finest thing she had ever owned. She took it out and played it though her fingers, and the twins’ mouths dropped agape with astonishment. ‘Golly, that’s nice!’ Missie exclaimed. ‘Did Sam send it?’

  ‘Must have,’ Magda said before Sarah could answer. ‘It would hardly be from Richard.’

  Sarah was a little disturbed, though, because jewellery was quite an intimate gift to give someone. ‘Oh, it is so beautiful but I really can’t accept it,’ she cried.

  ‘Why on earth not?’ Peggy said. ‘It’s just a Christmas present, and the sort I would welcome with open arms, I don’t mind telling you.’

  ‘Yes, but it must have cost a great deal of money,’ Sarah said. She was under no illusions as to what a soldier was paid, having both a father and a brother in the army.

  ‘I wouldn’t waste a day worrying too much about that,’ Peggy said. ‘Sam evidently wanted you to have it.’

  ‘Yes, and all I had for him were the inevitable socks and cigarettes and the chocolate,’ Sarah said.

  ‘You don’t give a present so you can receive one,’ Marion reminded her. ‘Let me fasten it round your neck and you will see the full beauty of it.’

  ‘It is lovely,’ Sarah said, looking at herself in the mirror above the fireplace.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ Peggy agreed. ‘And if I was lucky to be given a pendant like that I would just say thank you very much.’

  ‘Right,’ Marion said, ‘and unless we stop discussing all this and get the breakfast things cleared away there will be no dinner made at all today. You know your granddad’s coming to our house for it this year.’

  ‘If Grandma was alive, she’d find something horrible to say about that pendant,’ Magda said. ‘Granddad won’t, though,’

  ‘Magda what a thing to say,’ Marion said quite sharply, but her heart wasn’t in the rebuke because the very same thought had flitted across her mind.

  Polly and Pat came round after dinner, Pat proudly carrying the box camera Polly had bought him as a surprise present. Marion had known all about it because she had helped her sister search high and low for it, and Pat said he wanted to take a snap of them all in their Christmas finery. When they learned the story of the pendant, though he insisted on taking a few of Sarah on her own.

  ‘When they’re developed you can send a couple to your young man,’ Polly said. ‘You’ve made a really good job of that blouse and the pendant sets it off a treat.’

  ‘Thank you, Aunt Polly,’ Sarah said. ‘But Sam is not my young man.’

  Polly said nothing further to her niece but later, in the kitchen with Marion, making tea, she said, ‘Who’s your Sarah trying to kid? No chap sends a girl a present like that if she’s just a friend.’

  ‘I did think that myself,’ Marion said.

  Polly nodded. ‘I reckon he’s sweet on Sarah and this is his way of letting her know.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ Marion said. ‘I don’t think she feels like that about him.’

  ‘Maybe she’s not letting herself feel that way about him when we are at war. Anyway, it’ll do no good us worrying about it, and if we don’t take these teas through soon they won’t b
e worth drinking.’

  Later that day Sarah wrote a letter to Sam thanking him sincerely for the pendant and promised that she would wear it every day she wasn’t at work. In his reply, just a couple of days later, he wrote that he was very pleased that Sarah had liked it so much and that the best present she could give him was the thought of her wearing it next to her heart.

  Sarah blushed when she read those lines and she felt as if her stomach was doing somersaults inside her. She folded the letter carefully and put it right at the bottom of the drawer she kept her underwear in, for she wanted no one to catch sight of it.

  By the time Sarah was ready to send her next letter to Sam, Pat’s photographs had been developed, but Sarah was hesitant to include any.

  ‘But why?’ Peggy asked.

  Sarah shrugged. ‘Dunno really. You don’t think it’s a bit forward?’

  Violet laughed. ‘You’re a card, you are, sometimes, Sarah. Course it ain’t forward. It’s even OK these days to tell boys that you like them.’

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t do that.’

  ‘No one is asking you to,’ Peggy said. ‘But to send him a photo, showing him the patchwork blouse and the pendant you were so delighted with won’t hurt.’

  So Sarah enclosed two of the photos with her letter, and in Sam’s response he sent her one of himself. Looking at it, Sarah was surprised at the memories that one small photo evoked, like his mop of dark hair, his deep brown, laughing eyes. She remembered the timbre of his voice and his ready infectious laugh, even the dark hairs on the back of his large square man’s hands, and her heart gave a lurch at the danger he was probably having to face.

  Maybe because of the pendant and the subsequent photographs, the content of the letters between Sam and Sarah changed and they spoke more about their thoughts and feelings. Sarah always had Sam’s picture in front of her as she wrote. Just to think of him sent her heart racing, but she shared these feelings with no one.

  In early February of that year a massive defeat and subsequent surrender of the German Army at Stalingrad in Russia cheered everyone.

  ‘Told you Hitler was daft to take arms against the Ruskies in the first place,’ Polly said later that day when she popped around to see Marion.

  ‘Well, it is good news, I suppose,’ Marion said doubtfully, ‘but I don’t think that it will change our situation any.’

  ‘It shows the German Army ain’t invincible, don’t it?’ Polly said. ‘It’s nice to know that the Germans are not having it all their own way and they can be beaten at something.’

  In the middle of May, when they heard of the RAF bombing of dams in the Ruhr, morale was high and it continued to rise as they heard of the Allied invasion of Sicily in the summer, followed by Mussolini’s disappearance.

  In the middle of all this, Jack left school. He had been desperate to go, but as his birthday was in August Polly wasn’t sure he wouldn’t have stayed on until Christmas, but Pat advised her to get him set on somewhere now.

  ‘I’d have liked him to get a trade behind him,’ he said to Marion. ‘He’s bright enough, but there are few apprenticeships now, with the boys all being called up at eighteen. Maybe after the war there’ll be some scheme organised.’

  In the meantime HP Sauce had a vacancy, and when they agreed to take Jack on Polly told the education authority and they let him leave in July.

  ‘Mind you, Jack wasn’t pleased at first to be working at the Sauce,’ Pat confided a few months later. ‘He told the gaffer he wanted to do something for the war effort before it was too late. Anyroad, the gaffer had the measure of him ‘cos he told him that he was working for the war effort, that they had to put on extra lines for the troops when the war began and that a dollop of HP was a necessity to make the army-issue bully beef and mashed potato edible. Jack could see his point and he’s fine about it now.’

  ‘Has to be, don’t he, really?’ Marion said. ‘Can’t pick and choose these days. You’ve got to knuckle down and get on with it. Still, it might be over in no time now that Italy’s surrendered.’

  ‘Well, the tide has certainly turned,’ Polly said. ‘Daddy said the Eye ties’ heart was never really in the war. He sees this as the beginning of the end. But I’m not too sure.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  Sarah thought the beginning of the end seemed a long time coming, and she expressed her feelings of frustration and hopelessness in letters to Sam as the war dragged on through another Christmas and the turn of the year. The optimism of his replies always made her feel better.

  Then in mid-February 1944 the Americans disappeared. The girls noticed this first, of course, and Sarah mentioned it to her mother on the way to Mass one morning.

  ‘Disappeared?’ Marion repeated. ‘Where have they gone then?’

  Sarah shrugged. ‘Can’t answer that. But they’re not around here any more.’

  ‘None of them?’

  ‘Well, there wasn’t one at the dance last night,’ Sarah said. ‘And Saturday night was always a big night for them, as a rule.’

  ‘And they gave none of you a hint of this last week?’

  ‘No,’ Sarah said. ‘But then why should they? They owe us nothing, and maybe they didn’t know themselves. If they had known they probably wouldn’t have told us anyway. You know, like that poster says, “Careless Talk Costs Lives”. The way they go on sometimes it’s hard to remember that they’re not in Britain to have fun with the British girls and jitterbugging the night away, but they’re really here to fight a war. It’s a pity that some of the other girls didn’t realise the Americans could be whisked away at a moment’s notice.’

  ‘You didn’t have your head turned then?’ Marion said with relief.

  For a moment Sarah thought of Chuck and the way they had enjoyed dancing together, and recognised it for what it was: a brief and pleasant interlude in both their lives. She hoped whatever was in store for him that he would make it through the war in one piece because he had been a really nice and kind man. In fact, they had all been kind. People spoke of how good they were to children and wished no harm on anyone. But still she was able to say with honesty, ‘Not me, Mom.’ Then she checked her sisters were out of hearing before saying, ‘Though some girls lost more than their heads. We all tried to warn them not to be so silly. They were the ones doing all the weeping last night, especially Betty Mulligan, who confessed to me that she hasn’t seen her period for three months now.’

  ‘Ah, dear God,’ Marion said. ‘The poor girl will bring shame on the whole family.’ And she had a flashback to when her sister came seeking her in the same condition all those years ago.

  ‘I know,’ Sarah said. ‘I do feel sorry for her because she’s not bad, just a bit daft. She said that she told the father last week and he promised to look after her, see his commanding officer and get married by special licence. As if anyone but a fool would believe that. But she swallowed his fairytale hook, line and sinker, as the Americans would say.’

  ‘And now the baby’s father is God alone knows where?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s it,’ Sarah said. ‘And what gets me is that they didn’t know the least thing about any of these boys. I mean, Betty only knew his name, which he told her was Mitch Stevens, and you never know, that might not even be his real name. The only other thing he told her was that he came from a small town in mid-America and that he was in the Eighth Army, whatever that means.’

  ‘Poor girl,’ Marion said, as the church came into view. She did mean that, but she was heartily glad that her daughter hadn’t come to her in the same condition. In fact she was glad none of them had – her nieces or Peggy and Violet, of whom she had grown so fond.

  ‘I was talking to Emma Baldrick this morning as we was hanging our washing up and she was telling me a tale,’ Polly told her sister and niece one Saturday morning in early April.

  ‘What’s that, then?’ Marion asked.

  ‘Well, seems her sister, Winnie has been having a bit of a time of it, bombed out with two nippers in 1941
and still living in a church hall. Anyway, her nerves have been bad and the doctor has put her off work, sick for a week or so, and with the Easter holiday coming up, Emma suggested she go down south for a real rest where they had an aunt and cousins living. Seems they used to holiday down there when they were children and were always made welcome. Anyroad, this aunt wrote back just the other day and said she would love to help Winnie, but the South Coast was out of bounds to civilians.’

  ‘The whole South Coast is out of bounds?’ Marion said.

  ‘Obviously the woman couldn’t be more specific,’ Polly said, ‘but at a guess I would say it’s out of bounds because that’s where lots of troops are camped ? those Americans, maybe, as well as some of our own. And if that’s the case they ain’t staying there because they like the view.’

  ‘You think it means they’re going to try invading France, don’t you?’ Sarah said.

  ‘Don’t you?’ Polly responded. ‘For the life of me I can’t see what else they might be massing there for.’

  Marion put her head in her hands. ‘Oh God! Another Dunkirk!’

  ‘This won’t be anything like Dunkirk, though, will it?’ Polly said. ‘Then it was just Britain standing alone. This will be the massed Allies.’

  Polly’s eyes met Marion and Sarah’s and they were all thinking the same thing: that their loved ones could easily be part of the ‘massed Allies’.

  Marion sighed. ‘We’ll say nothing to the twins about this for now. When we know something definite will be soon enough to tell them anything. Anyroad, if information gets into the wrong hands it could further endanger the lives of many servicemen already putting their lives on the line for us all.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Polly said, ‘we’ll keep this to ourselves for a bit and I’ll have a word with Emma and advise her to do the same.’

  After Polly had gone, though, Sarah wrote a letter to Sam. Towards the end she mentioned the nice weather they were having and asked him if he could see the sun sparkling on the sea from where he was.