The Running Years

by Claire Rayner

  The words kept repeating themselves in her head as she went about the day’s work, checking the cut of the capes and the dresses, watching over the stitching of the aprons and caps, thinking, three weeks, three weeks, three weeks. If I can stop myself saying for three weeks, it will be all right.

  It was a crazy thought, a totally illogical idea, but it sustained her. Each evening she went home to find Judith waiting there for her, for she had surrendered her control entirely with Hannah. With everyone else she was her old self, chattering bright, full of busyness and excitement. The bandage rolling ladies of the West End commented to each other admiringly on how brave Judith Lammeck was, and how she was an example to all young wives, or more waspishly told each other it was remarkable how unmoved she seemed about her dear husband’s absence; these days, young women were all hard selfishness were they not? But to Hannah Judith displayed her distress in all its rawness.

  She would manage, somehow, to get herself to Paultons Square every evening in time to collect Charles to take him home, or sometimes, more and more often now, to kiss him goodnight as he curled up in the spare bed in Mary Bee’s nursery. The two children were becoming inseparable, for now that Judith’s nanny had gone to make munitions, leaving the house staffed only by maids who were not bright enough to be of much use doing war work, it was better for Charles and easier for Judith to let him spend his days with Florrie and Bet. There had been some desultory talk of Florrie going off to a factory but Bet coaxed her out of it, and Florrie knew herself to be indispensable to Hannah’s war work, and so stayed put. More and more Charles regarded Paultons Square as his second home and, inevitably, so did Judith.

  Perhaps that was one of the reasons she was so unguarded with Hannah, or perhaps it was an awareness that Hannah shared her sense of loss. It would never have occurred to her that Hannah felt anything but cousinly affection for Peter; Hannah knew that, and it made her own situation that much moire poignant, her guilt a greater weight on her mind. It was not eased by looking at Judith’s exhausted little face, the eyes shadowed and dull.

  They spent many evenings together - for Judith could not bring herself to go to fund-raising balls while Peter was at the Front. They sat facing each other on each side of the fireplace in the pretty white drawing room with its Heal’s furniture and its sinuous shapes, often knitting, sometimes sewing, frequently just staring at the dull embers in the grate. It was almost as though they were an elderly married couple, Hannah thought and almost said as much to Judith, and then, as ever, did not. More and more Hannah was learning that superficial chatter was the only safe talk there was. She became, despite Judith’s frequent company, more and more lonely.

  Chanukah, the festival of lights, came and Judith’s spirits lifted a while. She hurled herself into planning entertainment for the children, giving them their daily gifts for the eight days of the holiday (which made them both tell Florrie and Bet, happily decorating their small tree in the kitchen, that Christmas might be all right, but it wasn’t a patch on Chanukah, which went on for days and days and days) and being everything a mother and aunt should be. Hannah did all she could to be as eager, but it was becoming harder to dissimulate.

  The three weeks he had so feared had long gone, and still Peter survived. He wrote long letter to Judith, and equally long ones to Hannah, filled with friendship but with no hint that there was anything more than that between them, and seemed well enough; he was acting as a supply officer behind the lines, but went up to the trenches quite often, he said, to ensure that all the men needed was getting through. Hannah would take a deep breath, trying to control the fear that rose in her as she read his words, reminding herself that by the time the letter reached her he had moved on, and would agree brightly with Judith, that ‘he seemed to be his old darling self, did he not?’

  By the end of January she was beginning to feel better. As the memory of that June night receded, so did some of the guilt; it had happened, and that was that. It had not been premeditated, and clearly it had done no harm to anyone but herself. She was suffering, but Judith was obviously not. Letters came with punctilious regularity; Judith relaxed and became less fearful, more cheerful in the evenings in Paultons Square. Hannah was feeling better too, for had Peter not survived the horrors of the trenches for four months now? He might even get some leave soon. And then she would feel that stab of fear again and would think wildly, ‘If he does, I'll have to go away - not see him. Take Mary Bee to the seaside perhaps.’ She shook her head at her own idiocy, for who went to the seaside in the depths of winter?

  In early February, Uncle Alex came to see her, for the first time in some weeks. He had been, he told her with not a little self importance, hectically busy.

  ‘I tell you, dolly, feedin' that lot - it’s like pushing mountains down the Commercial Road. Running forty restaurants is a pushover compared with it on account people're prepared to pay for what they get in a tea shop. But dealing with the army, it’s like selling apples to a man with no teeth. They don’t eat the stuff themselves, the officers that do the buying. So they don’t see that the cost of it has to be what it is and they keep cuttin' back. So there’s me with the farmers on one side screaming for top rates and the complaints about the bully beef and plum and apple jam from the soldiers on the other, and the officers in between - I tell you I feel like a nut between two sets of crackers.’

  Bu he was obviously in his elements, busy and content, and he beamed at her over his still burgeoning belly and lit another cigar. He might look like the sort of war profiteer so many of the nastier current jokes were about, but he was working hard and he clearly too pride in his contribution.

  ‘I'll tell you why I came, dolly,’ he said after a moment. ‘It’s Solly.’

  She frowned sharply. ‘Solly? What’s the matter? He’s not ill?’

  He shook his head and grinned. ‘Ill, that one? Tough as a pair of old boots. No dolly. It’s just that he says he want to join the army.’

  She closed her eyes for a moment. Solly? But he’s so young.’ She herself was almost twenty-four and Solly twenty, but somehow when she thought of him she still saw the cheeky small boy with the grubby clothes and the watchful sideways look in his round eyes, not the weedy youth that he had become.

  ‘I thought they’d turn him down, he’s so scrawny, but they're not so fussy as they was, the recruiters. They said they’d take him. Trouble is, your father. Since Jake went up to Scotland on that training camp job there’s only Solly to take care of or father - I mean, Aunt Sarah really does it all, but you know what I mean. Nathan’s got to think it’s his own life and his two boys - he don’t take no help from relations if he can help it. If he knows it - you know what I mean?’

  ‘I know what you mean.’ She was silent for a while.

  ‘What do I do?’

  ‘I did what I could. Asked Nathan if he’d bury the hatchet, now you're a widow. I thought, if he’s got you maybe he'll let Solly go. And Solly, he’s getting very upset, stuck at home. Four times some stupid bitch gives a white feather in the street, he feels it, the boy.’

  ‘What did Poppa say?’ She had felt a moment of lifting pleasure. Could they pick up the old threads again, she and Nathan? But Uncle Alex shook his head.

  ‘That one! O' course he won’t. So, all I can try do is try to get some sort of army job for young Solly that don’t take him to France. London’s full of bleedin' officers in fancy uniforms that don’t never get mud on their boots. So I thought these officers, they got to have batmen, drivers and that, eh? I got my contacts, but I used ‘em a lot already to get favours, got three o' boys from the gym into the regiments they wanted that way, Jews though they are, and I can’t keep on pullin' the same bits o' string without breakin' ‘em. So I thought, maybe you could ask your father -in-law. That ferstinkeneh mumser’s done little enough for you and his granddaughter. So maybe he can do something for her uncle, hey?’

  She shook her head, reddening. ‘Dear Uncle Alex, you can’t mean it: They ha
ven’t spoken to me for five years. Not since Daniel died. His mother took it into her head that I’d - that it was something I did that made him … that … ‘ She shook her head. ‘Please, I can’t. It’s not that I don’t want to help. You know I do. But not that way.’

  He made a small grimace, and finished his cup of tea. ‘Well, if you can’t you can’t. I'll pull on my bits of string again. But I ain’t too hopeful, I tell you.’

  ‘I could ask Judith,’ she said after a moment. ‘Her father-in-law, Alfred, he might. He’s got some sort of pull at the War Office. He tried to keep Peter away from France that way, but Peter wouldn’t have if of course.’ She tilted her chin with a moment of pride, and Uncle Alex looked at her sharply.

  ‘Is that a fact? All these people with consciences, what’s the sense of it? You don’t have to go to France to get yourself spitted to be useful. I reckon you do a better job bein' a bit less heroic and a lot more practical,’ he said. ‘You think that Alfred’d do something for young Solly? It’s not just for your father, you know. I know the recruiters took him, but you only got to look at the boy to know he wouldn’t last five minutes out there.’

  ‘I'll ask Judith,’ Hannah felt the weight of hopelessness settle on her again. It had been easing as the week went by, but now this. Solly at the Front to worry about as well as Peter? It had been a small comfort that Jake had been selected for a job as a training corporal in the north when he had joined the army; she thought then for once God had been on her side. but now Solly

  ‘I'll ask,’ she repeated.

  Being asked seemed to help Judith in a most remarkable way. She listened to Hannah’s explanation of the problem and caught fire, just as the old Judith would have done.

  ‘Of course we'll have to arrange it!’ she said, and went chattering on about whom she would call and how it could be done, and left in a flurry of furs and plans.

  For the next two weeks she was almost her old self again, busy sparkling, seeming happy in her hard work, bustling from Whitehall office to rich house to Paultons Square and back again.

  Charles seemed more content too, not waking in tears in the middle of the night as he had been doing, and Hannah, putting the children to bed one night, thought, it’s going to be all right. We can manage, I think we can manage. She hugged Charles and settled him on one side of her lap and Mary Bee on the other and began to read them their bedtime story.

  It was one of those muggy evenings in February when it thickened over the London chimney pots and the streets smelled of people’s suppers and horses and the promise, some time soon, of spring when snowdrops and crocuses would appear in the sooty little front gardens of Chelsea. The children were warm and scented from their baths, and sleepy as they listened to her reading with slightly glazed eyes, both with their thumbs in their mouths, and Hannah felt a lift of sheer pleasure as she sat there, murmuring her story of Peter Rabbit and Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail. She heard the telephone ring below, heard Florrie’s footsteps come toiling up from the kitchen to answer it, still reading and with no sense of anxiety in her. For weeks now every knock on the door, every ring of the telephone had made her stomach lurch but tonight the sound did not. Even when Florrie’s footsteps came up the stairs, and the door opened she felt no sense of doom. She just hugged the children and said, ‘That’s all for tonight, my darlings. Tomorrow we'll finish it. Now let Florrie tuck you in while I go and talk to whoever it is, Florrie?’

  ‘It’s that there Mildred, mum,’ Florrie said. ‘From Mrs Lammeck’s ‘ouse.’ She looked at Hannah uneasily, but Hannah had smiled back, still a little dreamy herself from the story telling and the soft warm children. ‘Sounds a bit put out, she does. I'll tuck ‘em in, mum, while you go and talk to her. Come on you two, up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire.’ Mary Bee giggled and said shrilly. ‘Soppy Florrie! We're already upstairs!’ and Florrie laughed and Hannah went away leaving the warmth of the nursery behind her with a small pang. Mary Bee was growing so sturdy and tall; it was such a little time since she had just been an armful of hungry baby.

  ‘Oh, mum,’ Mildred’s thin voice crackled at the end of the telephone. ‘Oh, mum, what do we do? ‘ere’s a telegram come for Missus and Cook’s ‘avin' the vapours cos she says she knows it’s the master dead and mangled in that there ‘orrible trench and what shall we do, mum, on account of Madam ain’t ‘ere, and I thought she might be there, and would want to know right away, wouldn’t she mum?’

  47

  Bereavement this time came easier because there was so much around her. There was Charles’s still white face, determinedly showing no feeling at all as he went about the day’s play and lessons with Miss Porteous, the visiting governess Hannah had employed for the children. There were Florrie and Bet looking drawn and streaked with tears. Above all, there was Judith, who had come to stay with Hannah and now sat in the big chair beside the nursery fire all day and stared at the embers and said nothing. Looking after Judith coaxing her to eat and drink, urging her to go to bed at night and persuading her to get up again in the morning, above all dealing with the commiserating telephone calls and letters that came for her, gave Hannah little time to explore her own distress.

  But it sat low in her belly, an amalgam of memories of the way she had felt when Daniel had died, her own still smouldering guilt about her relationship with Peter, her sadness for the disappearance of Judith’s sparkle - for that had vanished at the moment the telegram had been put into her hands - and finally her private sense of confusion over the loss of Peter himself. When Daniel had died he had seemed to her to be snuffed out. There had been no lingering consciousness of his existence. It was as though he had never been. But then there had been all the trappings of death, a funeral, a shivah, to make it all real. For Peter there was just a piece of paper, no funeral, no special rites to mourn his passing (for Judith, showing her only spark of will, had refused to go to her parents-inlaw’s home to sit and mourn there, and certainly Hannah cold not visit them). So he seemed to linger on in her world, shadowy, but with so strong a sense of his presence that sometimes she actually found herself looking up to see him. I'm going mad, she thought one night, frightened.

  But she did not go mad. She just went doggedly on, working at the factory and dealing at home with the restructuring of their lives.

  It was not easy, for Judith was so pliable. Whatever Hannah said she acquiesced. Hannah thought Judith should move into Paultons Square for a while? Then Judith would. Hannah thought that Judith should start sewing for something to do as the days crept by? Then Judith obediently took up her needle. Hannah thought Judith should eat and drink and bathe? Then Judith would. But she did nothing of her own will, and the weight of her became ever greater, until at last Hannah decided that she needed help. It was not right that there should be just herself looking after Judith and Charles; they needed contact with Peter’s family.

  Was it because they were themselves so stunned that they remained aloof? Certainly none of the Lammecks made any attempt to contact Judith at Hannah’s house, though plenty of caring messages came from her friends and her own cousins. But her in-laws were silent, and because of her own remoteness from the clan it was difficult for Hannah to know how to cope.

  She asked her Uncle Alex what she should do. He sat over coffee with Hannah after Judith had gone to bed, his lips pursed as he considered.

  ‘I tell you, it’s crazy,’ he said at length. ‘How come people can behave so strange? Here’s a man, his only son gets killed in the trenches, he don’t make no effort to get in touch with his grandson, and his grandson’s mother? Me, I ain’t got no sons and I ain’t got no grandsons, but believe me, dolly, if I’d lost the one there’d be nothing in this world’d keep me away. I can’t understand it. These English Jews, I just can’t fathom ‘em.’

  She smiled at little at that. ‘What do you mean, English Jews? What are we but English Jews?’

  He shook his head. ‘We're different, dolly. We came from the shtetls with gornicht mit gorni
cht, with nothing in our pockets to call our own. All we had was each other, you know? You won’t remember how it was, but I tell you, it was beautiful. A person arrives, got nothing but a few kopecks in his pockets, and the clothes on his back, an what does he do? He looks for his landsleit, the people from his shtetl in the old country, and when he finds them in Spitalfields or down the Commercial Road, Stepney way, they look after him. He gets married? They look after his wife and children God forbid trouble should come to him. And they're still doing it, though it’s twenty, thirty years or more since some of ‘em came here. All over the East End now there’s people lookin' after soldiers' widows and children like they’ve always looked after widows and children. But these English Jews, these rich men in their big fancy houses who call kings and lords their landsleit, they leave their young widows like… ‘ His voice trailed off in hopeless fury. ‘I tell you I don’t understand them. They make sick!’

  They're upset themselves, I suppose,’ Hannah said, feeling oddly impelled to defend the Lammecks and Damonts, thought they had used her in her time of loss as badly as they were using Judith now, and even though Judith was one of them in a way she, Hannah had never seen. ‘Peter was special. I mean, everyone is, especially someone’s only son, but there was more than that. He was special … ’