The Girl on the Beach

by Mary Nichols

  Life, for Julie, took on a new dimension; her horizons widened. She was vibrantly alive and instead of feeling isolated she felt part of it all, especially when she was with Harry, whom she idolised. She didn’t want it to end and neither did he, but end it did. And it was all the fault of Ted Austen.

  She always did her best to avoid him, but sometimes they met in the kitchen or the garden and he would grin at her and tell her he had not forgotten the beating he had endured on her behalf and that it had to be paid for. She would be sorry. ‘Not as sorry as you if you touch me again,’ she retorted on one occasion.

  ‘Oh, and who is to stop me?’

  ‘The same person who stopped you before.’ She knew as soon as she spoke she had made a grave mistake. He did not say anything, but he was grinning like a Cheshire cat.

  The next Sunday, returning from her meeting with Harry, she was summoned to Lady Chalfont’s sitting room. She went with some trepidation, but with no idea what was to come.

  ‘I believe you have been meeting a young man on your afternoon off,’ Her Ladyship said. ‘You know it is expressly forbidden for the servants to have followers, especially servants like you whose family background no one can know. I was always sceptical about employing you but Sir Bertram said we should give a Foundling inmate an opportunity to make good. And this is the sorry outcome.’

  Julie stood and stared. It was so unexpected she didn’t know what to say. ‘Well, miss, what have you to say for yourself? Do you deny it?’

  ‘No, My Lady.’ Julie had been taught always to be truthful, and in any case, denying Harry would be like a betrayal.

  ‘I cannot have you contaminating my innocent children and setting a bad example to the rest of the staff. Go to your room and pack your bags. You may stay there for the rest of today and tonight. You will not see the children or do anything for them, do you understand? You will leave first thing in the morning and take nothing you did not bring with you when you first came here or buy with your own money. I am prepared to pay the wages owed to you and that is being generous.’

  ‘But where am I to go?’

  ‘That is not my concern. You should have thought about that before you embarked on this affair. Go to your young man, seeing as you put him before your job here. You will probably discover he has feet of clay, just as you have.’

  Julie turned away. She did not think Lady Chalfont knew Harry’s name and she would not divulge it. Harry was employed by Sir Bertram, as was his father. Going to Harry would put them at risk.

  She trudged up to her room at the top of the house and shut herself in. It was here, where no one could see or hear her, she gave way to despair and howled with misery, frustration and anger, mostly anger. She had no doubt who had betrayed her and wondered how anyone could be so vindictive.

  When she had no more tears left, she stopped crying and scrubbed at her eyes. It was done now, but where could she go? She dragged her carpet bag down from the top of the wardrobe and began stuffing her things in it. They did not amount to much: some underclothes, a few toiletries, a hairbrush and comb, a pair of slippers and two nightdresses she had bought to replace those the hospital had provided her with when she left them. There was her Sunday dress but she would have to wear that because her two uniform dresses, aprons and caps would have to be left behind. There was a book of poems Harry had given her for her birthday, which the Foundling Hospital had decreed was exactly a week before she arrived there, and a scarf and gloves he had given her for Christmas. Everything was soon stowed in the bag and, as she had nothing else to do, she went to bed. But not to sleep.

  Next morning, bleary-eyed, she collected two weeks’ wages from the housekeeper; Lady Chalfont declined to see her again and would not allow her to say goodbye to the children. She picked up her bag and left by the mews gate. Ted Austen was lounging against the garage door smoking a cigarette. She turned and hurried away in the opposite direction, half afraid he would follow her. But then she told herself not to be so silly; he had to drive Sir Bertram to the factory, as he did every weekday morning, returning to take Lady Chalfont to the shops or to her various social engagements, and he would not dare absent himself. But she was aware of his triumphant grin.

  She took a train to Berkhamsted and the Foundling Hospital, the only other home she had ever known.

  Harry stood by the bandstand for two hours the following Sunday before giving up and going home. He did not think for a minute that Julie would stand him up on purpose, so something must have prevented her from coming. He did the same thing the following week and by then he was becoming very worried. She had become important to him; he missed her infectious laugh, her serious moments, her naivety mixed with a kind of age-old wisdom which made her uniquely Julie. At work, he tried to find out if anything catastrophic had happened at the Chalfont residence which might have prevented her from meeting him, but no one knew anything and Sir Bertram arrived at the factory each morning as he always did and seemed his usual smiling self.

  The third Sunday it was raining and he toured their indoor haunts but there was no sign of her. On subsequent Sundays, he took to standing at the end of her street in the hope of catching a glimpse of her, and when that proved futile, he wandered down the mews and peeped in the back gate. It was here, one Sunday, he saw Ted Austen who took a malicious delight in telling him Julie had been dismissed.

  ‘What for? Where’s she gone?’

  ‘What for? On account of you. As for where she’s gone, how should I know? Good riddance say I. She was a tease.’

  ‘She is not a tease. What you mean is you couldn’t have your way with her. I know who to blame for this …’ He was clenching his fists down his sides and holding himself rigid to prevent himself lashing out. It was more important to find out where Julie had gone. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘How should I know? Didn’t she come running to you? Now, there’s a surprise. No doubt she’s found a new protector.’

  Harry raised his fist, changed his mind and strode away. He had to find Julie. But how? She could be anywhere in the whole of London, might even have gone further afield. It seemed hopeless. Why hadn’t she come straight to him? She must have known he would look after her.

  He went home and sought out his father who was reading the Sunday paper in the sitting room. They lived in a large semi-detached house in Islington. It was close enough to get to the factory easily, but far enough from it and the rest of the docklands to be considered above it in the social hierarchy.

  Harry flung himself down in the chair opposite his father. ‘Pa, how do you go about finding someone who’s disappeared?’

  Donald set aside the newspaper to answer his son. ‘It depends. Who’s disappeared?’

  ‘A girl I know.’

  His father grinned. ‘I thought there was something different about you. Putting all that stuff on your hair and dressing up of a Sunday afternoon. Who is she?’

  ‘Julie Monday. You remember when we went to Southend, I said I’d met this girl who was lost?’

  ‘No, when was that?’

  ‘The year I went to grammar school. She was down there with a crowd from the Foundling Hospital and I took her back to her charabanc.’

  ‘I seem to remember something about it. What about her?’

  ‘I met her again last year. She was working in Sir Bertram’s household. I heard her screaming for help and found this fellow molesting her in the garden, so I waded in and saw him off with his tail between his legs. We’ve been seeing each other off and on ever since. Now she’s been dismissed because Her Ladyship found out about it. I don’t reckon that’s fair, do you?’

  ‘No, perhaps not, but Her Ladyship is one of the old school.’

  ‘It isn’t as if we were doing anything wrong, simply going for walks and talking. Now she’s gone and I don’t know where. I’ve been going round all our old haunts but there’s no sign of her. She’s such a little innocent, I’m afraid she’ll get into trouble.’

  ‘I don’t see
it’s any of your business, son.’

  ‘Of course it’s my business. She lost her job because of me and I don’t think she’ll have been given a reference either. I can’t understand Sir Bertram. What’s so bad about seeing me?’

  ‘Nothing if you have been behaving yourselves.’

  ‘Of course we have. I wouldn’t—’

  ‘Glad to hear it.’

  ‘I’ve got to find her, Pa. She means the world to me.’

  ‘Oh, come on, son, she’s only a little orphan you’ve befriended. Don’t take it to heart.’

  ‘She is not only a little orphan. She’s Julie. There isn’t another like her in the whole world.’

  His father sighed. ‘Oh dear, you have got it bad, but I should try and forget her if I were you. She’ll survive on her own.’

  Harry could not forget her. He had remembered her for ten years and he would remember her for another ten, and it would not change how he felt about her nor his growing anxiety that she had come to grief. That bounder, Ted Austen, might know and he had a good mind to beat it out of him.

  Seeing his obdurate expression, his father added, ‘Don’t do anything rash, Harry. Remember she was working for our boss and you don’t want to make trouble, do you?’

  Harry didn’t, but it didn’t stop him seeking Ted Austen out and giving him a hiding. It didn’t do any good. Ted didn’t know where Julie had gone and he cared even less.

  What Ted did care about was the fact that he had a black eye and Sir Bertram would be bound to ask how he got it. He went to the kitchen and told the astonished staff he had caught a tramp snooping in the garden and seen him off. They were all for reporting the matter to the police, but he said the fellow had gone now and wouldn’t be back, he had seen to that. But he promised himself that wasn’t the last of it. He had endured regular beatings from his drunken father as a child and been unable to fight back, but after one particularly vicious punishment when he was twelve years old he had run away from home, vowing no one, no one at all, would ever lay a finger on him again. His life from then on had been one of begging and stealing and dodging the police, not always successfully. It was borstal that found him a job cleaning cars at a garage and it was there he had learnt to drive. When he saw the advertisement for a chauffeur for Sir Bertram, he invented a past that would be acceptable, forged a reference and found himself with a well-paid job, a smart uniform and comfortable home. But more importantly, there were no more beatings, until that fellow turned up and hurled him back into his childhood and the pain and suffering he had endured, and that he could not forgive or forget.

  ‘The hospital cannot take you back in once you’ve left,’ Miss Paterson had told Julie when she arrived on the doorstep of the brand-new Coram home, tired and hungry, and related her sorry tale. ‘And I’m afraid they would be disinclined to help you after getting yourself dismissed.’

  ‘It wasn’t my fault. We weren’t doing any harm.’

  ‘You broke the rules. Goodness me, after all the years with us, you must have realised the importance of obeying rules.’

  In spite of the scolding, Miss Paterson, who was very near retirement and had found herself a small first-floor flat in Shoreditch in preparation for that day, had taken pity on her and allowed her to move into the flat and helped her to find a job washing up and scrubbing floors in a boarding house on City Road, run by a Mrs Thornby.

  Julie was lonelier than ever and she missed seeing Harry. She wondered if he missed her. While her hands became red and rough from the soda in the scrubbing water, she mourned the days they had spent together and dreamt of meeting him again one day.

  It came about one Friday in January 1938. It was very early in the morning and she was on her knees stoning the front step when she became aware that someone had stopped behind her. Thinking he wanted to come up the steps, she got off her knees and stood aside to let him pass. And then she gasped. ‘Harry!’

  He stared. ‘Julie! I can’t believe it. I searched all over for you. Tell me what happened. How did you come to be here?’

  Julie looked fearfully towards the door of the boarding house. ‘I can’t talk now. I’ll get the sack.’

  ‘When do you finish work?’

  ‘When it’s all done and I go home to bed.’

  ‘Oh, come, you must have some time off.’

  ‘I have a half day a week and a Sunday once a month. It changes about according to what the other staff are doing. Now and again Saturday half day is followed by Sunday and that makes a lovely weekend.’

  ‘When is your next half day?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘That’s marvellous. I’m off tomorrow too. I’ll wait at the end of the road for you. What time?’

  ‘Julie!’ someone shrieked from inside the house. ‘I don’t pay you to gossip.’

  ‘Go away, Harry, please.’

  ‘Very well. Just tell me a time.’

  ‘Half past two. But I’m not promising.’

  He grinned and strode away.

  She watched him go. He was so handsome, so smart and, wonder of wonders, he had been looking for her. He had not forgotten her. Somehow or other she must make it to the rendezvous.

  The next day was bitterly cold and threatening snow, but that in no way deterred her. She wore her brown tweed coat, the scarf and gloves Harry had given her, a beret she had knitted for herself and a pair of black button shoes. It was not the weather that filled her with nervous apprehension as she hurried down the street that Saturday afternoon, but wondering if Harry might feel too ashamed to be seen out with someone as shabby as she was. Perhaps he would not be there, perhaps he would decide it was too cold.

  To her delight he was waiting for her, well wrapped up in a warm wool coat with a fur collar, a trilby hat and leather gloves. He took her hand and tucked it under his elbow. ‘Shall we find somewhere warm? A hot cup of tea and a bun, don’t you think?’

  ‘Lovely.’

  He took her to Lyons Corner House and they sat over tea and cakes, talking, talking, talking. ‘I nearly went mad wondering what had happened to you,’ he told her. ‘That fellow, the one who assaulted you, took great delight in telling me you had been sacked.’

  ‘He snitched to Lady Chalfont that I’d been seeing you. I don’t know what’s so bad about that. Her Ladyship was really nasty to me over it. I didn’t tell her who you were, though.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I didn’t want to get you into trouble too.’

  ‘Bless you. Is that why you didn’t meet me as we arranged?’

  ‘I couldn’t. I’d just started working for Mrs Thornby and I daren’t ask for time off as soon as I got there. I didn’t want to lose another job.’

  ‘Scrubbing steps.’

  ‘Among other things.’

  ‘Do you live in?’

  ‘No, I live with Miss Paterson. She was one of the teachers at the Coram.’

  ‘The one I saw that day at Southend?’

  ‘Yes. She’s just retired and we live in a flat in Shoreditch.’

  ‘Poor you, having to live with that dragon.’

  ‘She’s not a dragon, she’s kind-hearted and generous and if it hadn’t been for her, I’d have ended up in the workhouse.’

  ‘How loyal you are. You shield me and defend her and in the process ruin your pretty hands scrubbing.’

  ‘We all have to work.’

  ‘Not all. People like Lady Chalfont don’t do a hand’s turn and many women do nothing but look after husband and house.’

  ‘That’s work,’ she retorted.

  ‘But it’s work most of them choose to do. Wouldn’t you like to be free to make that choice?’

  ‘Pigs might fly.’

  ‘I mean it. Did you tell Miss Paterson why you were sacked by Lady Chalfont?’

  ‘Of course I did.’

  ‘And have you told her you were meeting me today?’

  ‘No, but I will. I didn’t want to say anything in case you didn’t turn up and I’d hav
e looked a fool.’

  He laughed. ‘Don’t you know me better than that?’

  ‘I hoped I did. Now you are here, what have you been doing? Are you still working at Chalfont’s?’

  ‘Yes. We’ve turned part of the production over to radios for aeroplanes. They will be needed if there’s a war.’

  ‘You think there’ll be a war, then?’

  ‘It looks more and more like it. Everyone at the factory thinks there will be and we’re working two shifts a day and my father spends all hours there. Mother worries about him and about Roly, who’s in the RAF now.’

  ‘Mrs Thornby is full of gloom. She lost her husband in the last war and keeps telling everyone how awful it was. All those thousands of men killed. My father might have been one of them. I shall never know for sure. It must be terrible for the fighting men and just as bad for those at home waiting for news. I know I should be worried to death if it were you.’

  ‘Would you?’ He reached out and took her hand and appeared to be studying it.

  ‘Of course.’ She looked down at their joined hands, one strong and beautifully manicured, the other red and angry with broken nails. How different they were, how indicative of the different lives they led.

  ‘Julie,’ he began. ‘I don’t know if this is the right time to say this, but I’m going to say it anyway. I love you very much and I couldn’t bear to lose you again, and the only way I can be sure is to ask you to marry me.’

  She stared into his face in disbelief. ‘What did you say?’

  He laughed and repeated it. ‘So what do you say? Will you marry me?’

  ‘Do you mean it? Really, really mean it?’

  ‘Of course I mean it, silly. I think we were meant for each other, right from the beginning when we met on the beach. Why else was I on hand when Ted Austen attacked you? Why else did I find you again after I thought I’d lost you for good? I was on my way to work when I spotted you yesterday. I usually go on the Tube but for some reason I decided to walk. It is fate, our destiny, whatever you like to call it. Don’t you feel it too?’