Dear Mrs. Bird: A Novel

by AJ Pearce

  And if Mrs Bird didn’t want to answer them, I would write to the readers myself.

  It was risky, of course. Enormously risky. But I had written to In A Muddle and signed it from Mrs Bird and nothing awful had happened about that. No one had known a thing. I bit my lip as I considered it. Yes. I could do this. If I was tremendously careful, I was sure that I could.

  I took a big stack of Mr Collins’ work from my in-tray and arranged it at the front of my desk so that if Kathleen came in, she couldn’t see what I was looking at. Then I fished out the letters Mrs Bird had thrown into the waste-paper bin and read them all again.

  I was horribly out of my depth with some of them. I hadn’t a clue what to say. My personal experience wouldn’t come anywhere near the mark. I sat back in my chair, chewing my thumbnail and thought of Mr Collins telling me I should do what I can, as well as I can.

  I would have to bone up. Research what a decent advice columnist would say, so as not to risk making things worse for the readers. I immediately felt cheered. That’s what journalists did all the time – research a big story. War Correspondents knew all about going undercover. I would approach helping the readers in exactly the same way.

  Even if I didn’t have the answers to the problems, lots of other far more popular magazines did. I wouldn’t copy from them, but I could learn. I felt most confident talking to girls my own age, so if nothing else, I could start by helping them.

  By the time Kathleen appeared with Mrs Bussell the tea lady, who was in a fluster because she was late, I felt galvanised. My bin was stuffed with a satisfactory amount of shredded envelopes from readers, while three letters hid under cover of darkness in my bag to take home. I would buy all the other women’s weeklies I could get my hands on and ask Bunty and the girls at the station if they could lend me theirs too. I could write letters and send them from the post box just outside in the street, and even if someone did write back to thank Mrs Bird for ‘her’ advice, as I opened all the letters, I could make sure Mrs Bird wouldn’t see it.

  She would never have to know a thing.

  It was espionage of the highest order and I should have felt sick to my stomach if Mrs Bussell hadn’t begun her usual warning about the perils of mid-morning tea.

  ‘You wait until you’re forty,’ she announced. ‘You’ll be halfway through The Change and everything will go to your hips.’

  I gave a suitable response to this traumatic news and took a flamboyant interest in the choice of biscuit. As the selection was limited, within a few moments I was back behind my typewriter with a cup of tea and an only slightly broken ginger nut.

  I felt high as a kite with my plan. Kathleen was also in a jubilant mood as she had been able to track down a lost parcel for Mrs Bird. She started chatting away.

  ‘I’m glad I found it,’ she said, after Mrs Bussell had left us to make another department fat. ‘It’s a whole lot of new patterns and samples. Mrs Bird would have gone positively barmy if we’d lost that. After this morning it’s probably best if you and I keep our heads down.’

  I let out a shrill laugh which wasn’t like me.

  ‘I should say!’ I roared, with my mouth full.

  Kathleen put her finger to her lips and said Shush.

  I returned to Mr Collins’ work.

  Head In The Clouds. Further chapters of our dashing new romantic serial.

  ‘Silly young Clara,’ I typed, following his script. ‘So much to look forward to in this gilded, lucky life. If only she would open her eyes and see how much the young captain might love her . . .’

  It was painful, giddy stuff. I typed on as the story became more and more dramatic. I was just a part-time

  Junior, diligently doing her job.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A Quandary Over Next Steps

  The only thing that really bothered me about deciding to write to the readers was not telling my best friend.

  Bunty and I didn’t have secrets. You can’t be friends with someone your whole life and not tell them what you’re up to. I was convinced she would disapprove of my plan, but I was dying to tell her about it. I hoped if I explained properly about helping people, she would understand.

  At the end of my morning at Woman’s Friend, I arrived home, a small parcel of letters hidden in my bag and a stack of women’s magazines from Mr Bone the news-agent under my arm. It had been snowing heavily again and I stamped my feet on the hall mat. I would stuff my shoes with newspaper when I got upstairs and dry them out there. As I pounded up the three flights to the flat, I called out a hello to Bunty, but she didn’t respond. She had been working nights again so might well be having a nap. I carried on up to the flat and into the living room.

  But rather than sleeping, Bunty was standing by the fireplace wearing a worried expression and her second-best blue skirt.

  ‘Emmy, I’m so sorry,’ she said, handing me an envelope, before I’d even taken off my hat. It was a telegram addressed to me. We never received telegrams. I could only think of one thing.

  Edmund.

  I felt myself go pale. I looked at Bunty and then back at the envelope. Then I took a deep breath.

  Bunty hovered as I opened it and read the five lines inside.

  But it was not what I had feared.

  In fact, when the contents revealed Edmund to be really quite well, I was in rather a quandary over next steps. I was enormously glad he hadn’t been shot by a German, but my spirits hardly soared with regards to the rest.

  ‘I’m so very sorry,’ said Bunty again. ‘Would you like a hankie?’

  She offered me hers. It was nice and clean, with lemon edging.

  ‘No thank you,’ I said, remaining polite in what was clearly A Difficult Situation.

  Bunty looked distressed. ‘Would you like to sit down?’ she said. ‘Perhaps I shall sit down. Is it Edmund? Poor, dear Edmund.’

  Bunty switched off the wireless, which had been playing an encouraging tune. Like everyone else, she knew that telegrams from overseas only ever contained very bad news.

  ‘Was he tremendously brave?’ she asked, clearly hoping for further information about Edmund’s probable death. Bunty was always terribly good in a crisis, but not noted for her patience.

  ‘No,’ I said, slowly. ‘No, I wouldn’t say that. Actually, Bunts, he’s gone off with a nurse.’

  ‘What?’ Bunty’s eyebrows became gymnastic. ‘I thought he was going to be dead.’

  I handed her the telegram and tried to think of the right thing to say. She read the contents and responded with some animation.

  ‘What’s he doing sending telegrams to you when clearly he is Perfectly Fine?’

  I stared back at her with my mouth open. It didn’t show much backbone on my part, but it was all I could muster.

  Bunty stuffed the lemon hankie up her sleeve as if it were a nasty reminder of misinformed grief.

  ‘A TELEGRAM?’ Her voice came out as a shriek. ‘What is he doing SENDING A TELEGRAM WHEN HE’S NOT DEAD?’

  She began to read it out loud, which I wasn’t sure was wise as she already looked well on her way to a seizure.

  ‘. . . fell for Wendy. Getting married on Saturday. No hard feelings. Cheerio then Edmund. PS . . .’ Bunty stopped reading and looked up. ‘Emmy, he’s jilted you. WHAT AN ABSOLUTE PIG.’

  Bunty was always good at making sure things were quite clear.

  I took the telegram back before she ripped it up in a fury and then put it on the mantelpiece, which was a mistake as now it looked like a last-minute invitation to an exciting event. Which, I supposed, for Wendy, it probably was.

  I tried to think calmly. It was the most enormous relief that Edmund was well. But other than that it was as if someone had whacked me in the stomach. I felt as if I might actually be sick.

  ‘Well,’ I finally managed. ‘We must be glad that Edmund’s all right. And not dead. That’s really terribly good.’

  ‘Well yes. Of course.’ Bunty nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said again, trying to m
ake a good fist of joining in. Then she gave up and added, ‘But it’s still utterly awful of him.’

  Bunty was right. I struggled to let it sink in. Edmund had been very quiet the past weeks, hardly writing at all, but I had told myself he was off fighting, which had been preferable to worrying that he was all right. It hadn’t occurred to me he might be off falling in love with somebody else.

  ‘How could he? You’ve only just sent him that vest,’ Bunty said making it sound as if I’d managed to build him his own tank.

  She was right again there. I could sew almost anything you might like, but I was dreadful at knitting and the vest had taken an age.

  ‘Perhaps he hadn’t received it,’ I said.

  I sat down heavily as my knees decided to give up.

  ‘I’ll get you a drink,’ Bunty said. Neither of us drank much at the best of times, but as today wasn’t turning into the best of anything, perhaps it was a good time to start.

  She lifted the lid off the drinks cabinet, which was in the shape of a globe. It was a huge, hideous article, but Bunty’s grandmother thought we would find it Modern. Bunty and I had decided that if the Germans invaded London and broke in, we would push it down the stairs at them. The full extent of the British Empire was featured in a rather confident orange and we thought that would make them quite wonderfully cross.

  ‘I’m making you a whisky and soda,’ said Bunty, who was keen on American films.

  It was twenty past three in the afternoon and neither of us drank whisky, let alone during the day. It was probably the sort of thing Bette Davis did all the time and would have been exciting if only it hadn’t been brought on by Edmund not wanting to marry me. I’d had no idea he’d gone off me. How could I have not seen it? I put my head in my hands and tried not to cry. I felt so stupid. And hurt.

  Bunty handed me my drink. I bet Bette Davis wouldn’t feel hurt. Actually, I bet she wouldn’t have got engaged to Edmund in the first place. He was probably a bit sensible for her and anyway, he would have thought being a famous actress was showy. After all, he had laughed at me just for saying I wanted to become a War Correspondent.

  I took a sniff of the whisky. Bunty, who was watching me anxiously, raised her glass and so did I. Then we both took what people in the know call a Big Slug.

  Within a moment my lungs started to burn and we both broke into a fit of coughing. After a time, I wiped my eyes and tried to pull myself together.

  ‘Bette Davis,’ I said. ‘What would she do? About Edmund?’

  ‘Shoot him with a pistol and go on the run,’ wheezed Bunty, sitting down beside me on the sofa and smoothing her skirt. ‘Honestly, Em, I know the vest looked like a maniac knitted it in a blackout and it probably did put him off you a bit, but running away with someone else really does take the biscuit.’

  ‘Doesn’t it?’ I agreed.

  The truth was I’d loved Edmund, or at least I’d thought I had, and we’d been together for ages, so it had seemed perfectly sensible to get engaged. I wondered what had happened to make him change his mind about getting married. Was it something I’d done, or had Wendy been too perfect to ignore? I didn’t know what to think.

  I sounded like one of the readers who wrote to Mrs Bird.

  Sitting in the winter gloom of the living room, I considered whether to risk another go at my drink. Now that the burning had calmed down, it wasn’t as bad as all that and I did feel it was helping me take a certain philosophical bent.

  I nodded towards the telegram on the mantel.

  ‘I wonder what Wendy is like,’ I said.

  ‘I bet she’s awful,’ replied Bunty, loyal to the hilt and without a shred of evidence.

  We both sat in silence for a moment, contemplating the enormity of the situation.

  ‘I’m going to have to let everyone know,’ I said.

  Bunty made a sympathetic face. ‘They’ll understand. Honestly, everyone will just want to help out and cheer you up. I can tell people if you want. I’ll tell William anyway,’ she said. ‘He’ll probably want to kill Edmund on your behalf. That’s if your brother doesn’t get to him first.’

  I gave a half-hearted smile and started to list everyone. I didn’t sound as plucky as I’d hoped.

  ‘Mother and Father and Granny and Reverend Wiffle.’

  Reverend Wiffle was our vicar. He had gout and a funny eye but was perfectly nice once you worked out which one it was you had to speak to. He would find a broken engagement very awkward indeed.

  In fact telling everyone was going to be grim. Father would say, ‘Emmy, the boy’s a bloody fool of the first order,’ and Mother would interrupt him with, ‘I don’t think swearing will help, Alfred, but I must say Edmund’s been Very Silly Indeed.’

  All in all it would be a bit much.

  ‘Bunts,’ I said. ‘I am going to be a spinster.’

  ‘Steady on,’ countered Bunty. ‘You’re still in with a shot.’

  ‘No, I’ve missed the boat. I’ll crack on, on my own.’

  I was trying hard to take Edmund’s rejection on the chin. No one liked a wallower and even if I was utterly crushed, I would look forward. After all, I was the one who wanted to march off to war as a reporter. I couldn’t sit in the corner and cry at the drop of a hat.

  I pushed on, getting up from the sofa and beginning to pace around the living room as I spoke.

  ‘I’m not going through this sort of business again, Bunts. From now on, marriage is strictly off limits. I shall concentrate on having a career.’

  ‘Good for you!’ said Bunty, blithely ignoring my recent disastrous job choice. ‘Who cares about Rotten Edmund anyway?’

  She took another slug of the whisky and then stood up.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she added in a gasp. ‘I don’t think I can breathe.’

  I thumped her on the back which didn’t help and then switched the wireless back on which I hoped possibly would.

  It was too early to get ready for my shift on the fire-station telephones, but after I finished my drink I went to my room to change into my uniform and try to take stock. Though I had managed to fight off tears and put on a brave front, the truth of it was I felt crushed. I sat on my bed next to the pile of magazines I’d brought home and wished I could just go to sleep for a month until everything felt better. It was pretty rich of me to think I could dish out advice to people who wrote in to Woman’s Friend. I couldn’t even keep hold of my own fiancé.

  I was entirely unqualified, although if nothing else I supposed I could sympathise, let the readers know they weren’t on their own. I’d just been unceremoniously dumped, but I had friends and family who I could count on, whatever happened and for as long as I needed them. As I sat in my bedroom feeling awful, Bunty was next door in the kitchen, making me a sandwich with the last of the meat paste because it was my favourite, and she hoped it might cheer me up. And while it would be difficult to tell Mother and Father about Edmund, I knew they would listen and reassure me that in the end, things would hurt less. And Thelma and the girls at the station would tell me how Edmund must be a prize idiot and they’d never liked the sound of him anyway. It might hurt like anything but I had lots of people who would listen, I wouldn’t have to plough through this alone.

  How awful it would be with no one to listen. What if my only choice was to write to a perfect stranger in a magazine for reassurance or advice? And then, after all that, they ignored me and didn’t reply. It would make things even worse.

  I wiped my eyes and had a big sniff. I couldn’t just sit around feeling low. Edmund had jilted me and I felt like a washout, but he wasn’t dead and he had sounded thrilled to bits in the telegram, so I was just going to have to wish him well and get on with it. I was still better off than loads of people and anyway, as Mother always said, Granny didn’t spend half her life chaining herself to railings for today’s woman to moon around waiting for some chap to look after her.

  Quite.

  ‘Right,’ I said out loud. ‘Come on.’

&nbs
p; I blew my nose, and then took the readers’ letters, my pen, and my notebook from my bag and reached for the first magazine on the pile. Then I turned to the problems on the second to last page, took the lid off my pen, and started to make notes. The advice was practical and largely sympathetic, and they answered questions about no end of things Mrs Bird wouldn’t entertain. Women who had lost their head with a man, been let down by one or were worried about another. Scared for their children or fed up with their parents. Some of the readers had been foolish, but none of the letters were scandalous. A few of the magazines promised to send leaflets explaining things that they couldn’t put on the page.

  I looked at the little pile of letters I had brought home from Woman’s Friend. It seemed terrifically small beer trying to help out the one or two who had included a stamp and their address, while these big colour magazines were read by thousands and thousands of people.

  What Woman’s Friend really needed was to print decent advice so more readers would see it. I wished Mrs Bird could see the other magazines.

  I re-read the letter I had brought home from Confused, the girl whose fiancé had lost interest in her. ‘He says he is fond of me but not passionately.’ Was that how Edmund had felt about me? If I was really honest, was that how I felt about him? Suddenly I was almost relieved that we weren’t going to get married. What if he hadn’t met Wendy, and instead, out of duty, had gone through with marrying me? It would have been dreadful. Perhaps there really was a bright side to all this.

  I felt equipped to reply to Confused and decided to draft an encouraging next move. But there was no return address or envelope for a reply. My moment of triumph was deflated. Hers was a problem I could confidently understand and quite possibly help, but now I couldn’t write back.

  In a funk I plonked the letter down on the bed.

  A combination of a rotten day and a large glass of whisky had given me a bullish view of things. Why shouldn’t we try to help Confused? Or any other girl in her position that read Woman’s Friend? It wasn’t as if Mrs Bird cared. She probably wouldn’t even notice if an extra letter made its way in.