The Bomb Girls' Secrets

by Daisy Styles

  ‘Hold on a minute, there’s more,’ he said, and with a laugh quickly went down on one knee before her. ‘Now that you’re free, Violet, my sweetest Violet … please will you marry me?’

  Bursting with happiness, Violet all but threw herself on Arthur, and, clutching each other, they laughed with joy as they rolled on to the heather.

  ‘YES! YES! YES!’ she cried in between planting kisses on his nose, his mouth and his eyes. ‘Yes, a thousand times over,’ she declared.

  ‘Mrs Arthur Leadbetter,’ he said playing with the sound of the name.

  ‘Mrs Arthur Leadbetter,’ she echoed his words.

  ‘To have and to hold,’ he said as he pulled her on top of him and squeezed her tight.

  ‘Till death us do part,’ Violet said gently as she sank into the ecstasy of her fiancé’s deep, long kisses.

  Heartbroken Kit returned to the cowshed the next day to find Gladys washing her hair in the bathroom.

  ‘KIT! KIT!’ she cried when she saw her friend. ‘Did you get my telegram?’

  Kit nodded but could barely speak. When Gladys saw her face running with tears, she quickly grabbed a towel and hurried towards her.

  ‘Kit!’ she cried again. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked anxiously.

  Seeing Kit starting to tremble, Gladys led her to the sofa and settled her close to the crackling wood-burning stove, where Kit immediately lit up a Woodbine.

  ‘I need to tell you something, Glad,’ Kit started. ‘And Violet too.’ Her voice dropped and she started to cry all over again. ‘But she’s probably not here any more,’ she wailed.

  ‘She is!’ Gladys retorted. ‘She didn’t go to Scotland after all!’ Gladys yelled, ‘VIOLET!’

  Still in her nightdress, Violet ran into the sitting room. At the sight of Kit, her face broke into a radiant smile, but when she saw her friend’s stricken expression she rushed to her, crying, ‘What’s happened to you, sweetheart?’

  With her dearest friends on either side of her, Kit started her story.

  ‘I have a son, a nine-month-old baby boy called Billy.’

  ‘A baby!’ Violet cried.

  Relieved that she could finally speak the truth, Kit poured out her tragic story – at the end of which, both her friends, who were doing their best to comfort their stricken friend, were in tears too.

  ‘We could have helped each other so much if we’d shared our secrets instead of keeping them to ourselves,’ Violet said regretfully. ‘I never told anybody about Ronnie. I was so ashamed of running away from him and keeping my identity a secret, and look what happened … it nearly killed me.’

  ‘The truth will out eventually,’ Gladys said wisely.

  ‘I kept too much to myself too,’ Kit confessed. ‘I was afraid you’d think I was a loose woman with no morals.’

  ‘As if we would have ever thought that!’ Violet exclaimed. ‘Everybody’s got something hidden in their past, however small. Nobody’s perfect.’

  As huge sobs ripped through her body, Kit cried out in an agony of pain. ‘God help me! I thought I was going back to Ireland to pick up my baby, but now I might never see him again.’

  34. Penance

  Left with a broken tooth and a black eye, not to mention his wounded pride, Lionel Fitzwilliam was determined to take revenge on somebody, and that somebody was his tenant, Murphy. At the sight of Kit’s father doffing his cap obsequiously to him, Fitzwilliam ran into his garden in a rage and hit Murphy repeatedly in the face before he threw him on his back and kicked him hard in the ribcage.

  ‘Take that – and that – and that for your bitch of a daughter!’ he yelled.

  Curled up in a ball of pain, Murphy begged for mercy, but Fitzwilliam had only just started. Barging into the cottage, he reappeared bearing an armful of bedding and clothes, which he threw on to the ground before re-entering the house. Five minutes later clouds of smoke emerged.

  ‘NO! NO!’ screamed Murphy as he ran towards the open door, which Fitzwilliam blocked with his broad bulky body.

  ‘This house’s not fit for sewer rats!’

  Seeing the flames, Rosie and her younger brothers came running in from the fields.

  ‘Somebody help us!’ Rosie screamed as the fire took out the roof and the house caved in.

  Fitzwilliam sneered at the distraught weeping family. ‘Get off my land and never show your faces round here again!’

  Speechless with shock, they watched him walk away – then the youngest boy burst into floods of tears.

  ‘Where will we go now, Rosie?’ he said, turning in bewilderment to his big sister, who shook her head in despair. ‘What’ll we do?’

  Seeing her devastated younger brothers and her home in ruins, Rosie, blazing with anger, turned on her father. ‘You have cursed this family!’ she cried. ‘You killed Ma with your beatings,’ she screamed. ‘You sold Kit’s baby, an innocent helpless child, for a pot of gold.’ Lowering her voice, she added, ‘You’re as bad a traitor as Judas himself. You’ll go to hell for your sins!’

  In Dublin, Ian and his private detective, Ross Dunleavy, had so far drawn blanks on all their leads.

  ‘I’m beginning to think the worst,’ Ian confessed as they sat in a local pub drinking pints of Guinness.

  ‘Which is?’ asked Dunleavy.

  ‘Billy’s long gone with the American couple.’

  Dunleavy wiped froth from the stout off his upper lip. ‘Do you want me to extend the search to New York?’ he suggested.

  Ian thoughtfully lit up a Pall Mall cigarette. ‘My instincts tell me not to do that until we know for sure we’ve really closed the door on finding Billy in Ireland.’

  ‘Much as I’ve enjoyed working with you, sir, I’d say you’d be throwing good money after bad.’

  ‘I’m going to pay Murphy one more visit before I leave,’ Ian said as he recalled Kit’s father’s mean, conniving face. ‘Could the old bastard be hiding something there? An address, a name, a number?’

  ‘You’re wasting your time on him, man, and on O’Rourke too,’ Dunleavy retorted. ‘You’ve got nowhere with either fella.’

  Ian took a deep slug of his Guinness. ‘Humph!’ he snorted, more annoyed with himself than with Dunleavy for his comments.

  Nevertheless, before he booked his passage home to England, Ian drove to Chapelizod, where he firmly told himself that if he had the misfortune to bump into Fitzwilliam again, he would exercise more self-control than on his previous visit. When he pulled up outside the Murphys’ house, he was stunned to see it reduced to a heap of cold ashes.

  ‘What happened here?’ he asked a passing neighbour.

  ‘The big man lost his temper and kicked the Murphys off his land,’ the neighbour replied.

  ‘Where did they go?’ Ian asked.

  ‘The young ones went west, to find work in Tipperary.’

  ‘And the father?’ Ian asked. ‘Where did he go?’

  The man shrugged. ‘Nobody knows. Somebody else came looking for Murphy: a big fancy legal man, he said he was.’

  Intrigued Ian asked, ‘Did he have a name?’

  The neighbour reached into his pocket and pulled out a slip of paper.

  ‘He left this, said I was to call him if I heard anything about Murphy’s whereabouts. Gave me a shilling for mi troubles too.’

  Completely amazed, Ian read out loud:

  DANIEL O’ROURKE,

  22 COPPERGATE LANE,

  DUBLIN

  ‘Do you know the man?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ian said through gritted teeth. ‘Yes, I damn well do!’

  Back in Dublin, Ian was aflame with righteous anger. Deep down, he’d known all along that somewhere along the line O’Rourke had been involved. He just had to be the link – but you had to hand it to him, he was devious enough not to get his hands dirty. He’d left thieving Murphy to do the dirty work whilst he handled the seemingly respectable side of things.

  If he was to expose O’Rourke, he realized he urgently need Mother Gabriel’s help.
Hurrying to the convent, he had to wait for her to finish mass with the rest of her order; then she joined him in the chilly visitors’ room. When she entered, Ian leapt to his feet.

  ‘I think O’Rourke is connected to the theft of Billy,’ he blurted out.

  After he’d told the shocked Mother Superior all that he knew, Ian said, ‘Do you know where the Garlands can be contacted?’

  She shook her head. ‘As God is my judge, I have no address for them,’ she replied as she laid her hand on the large crucifix that lay against her chest. ‘O’Rourke handled that side of the business.’

  ‘I bet he did,’ Ian seethed under his breath. Turning to the Mother Superior, he asked, ‘Is it at all possible that the Garland couple could still be in Ireland?’

  Mother Gabriel thought long and hard. ‘O’Rourke told me that they’d left some time ago in great sadness and disappointment.’

  ‘It might not be the truth,’ Ian pointed out.

  ‘We put them up in a nice family hotel, close to the convent,’ she recalled. ‘You could check with the proprietor, a nice young woman and a good Catholic too,’ she added. ‘She might be able to shed some light on the Garlands’ comings and goings.’

  ‘Thank you, Mother Gabriel, I’ll do that,’ Ian replied.

  The ‘good Catholic’ woman who ran the family business recognized the photograph of O’Rourke that Ian had had the foresight to cut out of a legal magazine he’d found in the local library.

  ‘Did you ever have dealings with this man when the Garlands arrived from America in the hope of adopting one of the convent babies?’ he began.

  ‘Oh, yes, for sure,’ she retorted.

  ‘Have you seen him or the Garlands again recently?’ he continued.

  ‘They were here all the while they were waiting for the adoption to go through, but then something went wrong and they left in a heartbroken state, poor souls.’ She sighed heavily. ‘Mr O’Rourke spent a lot of time with them at the end of their stay, even drove them to the port himself to take their ship home.’

  ‘Did they leave with a child?’ Ian asked.

  ‘No, sir! The missis, she told me that the mother of the child had changed her mind at the last minute and kept the baby to herself. Terrible to drag them all the way over the water to Ireland and then send ’em back empty-handed.’

  ‘They must have been devastated,’ Ian commented.

  ‘They were for sure, although Mr O’Rourke had a cheery effect on them, I overheard him say to them more than once, “Leave it with me.” I took it into my head that he was going to sort everything out for them. I hope so: they were that desperate for a child, God love ’em.’

  Ian left the family hotel and walked along the windy banks of the River Liffey to clear his thoughts, but O’Rourke’s smooth assuring words rang loud in his head: ‘Leave it with me.’

  Ian knew that, since then, O’Rourke had paid a mysterious visit to Kit’s father, who was indisputably involved in Billy’s disappearance. Could it be that O’Rourke had sent the Garlands back to the States with hope in their disappointed hearts? Could O’Rourke be on one end of the deal and Murphy on the other? Were they working in tandem, running rings around Mother Gabriel, Kit and himself too? If so, where was Billy now?

  After she’d clocked on, Gladys dashed to her pigeon-hole, where she found a letter from her father.

  We heard from the War Office today. There’s no easy way to tell you this, love, but our Les has been reported missing in action in Belgium. Come home as soon as you can, you mother is distraught.

  Ever loving,

  Dad

  Gladys’s heart skipped a beat. Intuitively she’d always known this moment was coming. At first she felt relief that the letter didn’t say ‘Killed in Action’; ‘Missing in Action’ could mean anything! Shot, wounded, imprisoned, hiding in a hedgerow. Her head whirled with all sorts of terrifying images. It was at least five months since Les had been in touch with his family, and anything could have happened to him in that time. Guilty that she hadn’t visited her parents earlier, she vowed she’d take a long-overdue day off and go to Leeds as soon as she could. As she hurried into the filling shed, she wondered what she could do to help her stricken mother. She had a sudden thought: some of Les’s pals from the Yorkshire Regiment might still be stationed at the barracks. Though she knew all soldiers were warned ‘Loose Lips Costs Lives’, Gladys decided she’d visit the barracks anyway; someone just might know something that would give Gladys and her parents hope and pity her enough to tell her.

  It was terribly hard to focus on her work in the filling shed. Beside her, Violet sang along to Workers’ Playtime, chuckling over Arthur Askey’s slightly smutty jokes, but Gladys’s thoughts were elsewhere. Knowing Les would want her to carry on as normal, Gladys forced herself to concentrate on the job in hand, when all the time her instinct was to run out of the factory and jump on the first bus into Leeds, where she knew she was desperately needed by her parents.

  It was a relief for Gladys when Kit joined her and Violet after her meeting with Mr Featherstone. Sitting glumly beside her friends, Kit appeared lost and withdrawn. Gladys and Violet exchanged anxious glances as Kit automatically stuffed one fuse case after another with gunpowder.

  ‘What did Featherstone have to say?’ Violet asked gently.

  Kit’s eyes filled with tears. ‘When I told him my baby had been stolen, and I was delayed in Ireland searching for him, he looked shocked but he still read me the riot act because I’d extended my compassionate leave without official permission,’ Kit replied with a scowl.

  Relieved that it sounded as if there would be no unpleasant repercussions for her friend, Violet said, ‘You got off pretty lightly, then, I reckon.’

  Kit shrugged. ‘I’d risk disobeying orders – even if it meant I had to go to prison – if there was the slightest chance of getting my Billy back,’ she said sadly.

  After having his home burnt down in front of him and his children abandon him, Murphy had taken to sleeping rough in hedgerows and stealing eggs and spuds from local farms when he could get away with it. As the wet weather set in, he became weak and hungry; then, after collapsing on the road to Dublin, he was taken unconscious to the workhouse. Lying on a truckle bed covered with a greasy old blanket, Murphy recalled Rosie’s departing words to him.

  ‘You sold Kit’s baby, an innocent helpless child, for a pot of gold. You’re as bad a traitor as Judas himself. You’ll go to hell for your sins!’

  Haunted by both his daughters’ curses, Murphy asked to see a priest. After hearing his confession the priest said, ‘You have sinned gravely, my son. Your penance is to recompense those whom you have wilfully harmed.’

  Murphy nodded; it was time to pay a final visit to Mother Gabriel.

  Meanwhile, Ian was still in Dublin. With the O’Rourke revelation unravelling, he delayed his return passage, even though he felt guilty about not returning to Kit as he’d promised. Leaving now whilst he was hot on the trail would be disastrous. He decided to visit Mother Gabriel and share his thoughts before visiting O’Rourke himself. He hoped she’d help him fill in any missing pieces of the jigsaw before he took the next step. After he’d told her what he’d found out from the family-hotel landlady and what he ultimately suspected, Mother Gabriel fell quiet.

  ‘Well, I have to say, Mr McIvor,’ she finally said, ‘’tis a bit far flung if you ask me. Mr O’Rourke has been helping us for years; he’s never put a foot wrong so far.’

  ‘I agree it sounds far-fetched,’ he replied immediately. ‘But think about it: we originally feared Billy might have been taken straight to New York – that’s the idea we’ve been working with. But what if O’Rourke realized that course of action was too risky? What if he thought it was safer to hide the child for a few weeks and then smuggle him out of the country when the heat’s off? He could have paid Murphy to steal the child because he knows his way around the convent. And then it’s just possible, isn’t it, that between them they’ve found some
where to hide Billy until it’s safe to steal him away?’ Ian looked animated now, more sure than ever that he might be on to something.

  ‘But the Garlands wouldn’t go along with such an underhand scheme. They were a decent law-abiding couple,’ Mother Gabriel insisted.

  ‘But what if they have no idea that they’re behaving illegally?’ Ian persisted. ‘O’Rourke’s a legal adviser, remember; they’ve been liaising with him all along, a fine upstanding man of the law who’s manipulating them, misadvising them, to his own ends. We know the cock-and-bull story that Murphy spun you: it’s convincing if you don’t know the facts. He could have spun the same line to the Garlands, who, like you, believed that he has only his grandson’s best interests at heart.’

  ‘So you think the child’s still here in Ireland?’ Mother Gabriel asked.

  Ian nodded, feeling physically sick just thinking of where Billy might be holed up.

  ‘That’s the feeling I have,’ he admitted. ‘We’ve been looking just in case he is still here, but now that we have a better idea of what might be going on, I hope we’ll have more luck. If only we knew who might be hiding the child!’ he cried. ‘We know for sure Murphy would dump him on anyone, but O’Rourke would be more careful of the boy’s wellbeing, don’t you think? If he was planning to smuggle him out of the country with a false name and a false passport, it would be in his interests that the child was healthy when he handed him over to the Garlands on his arrival in New York.’

  Mother Gabriel broke into his thoughts. ‘This is all supposition, Mr McIvor,’ she reminded him sharply.

  ‘I know, I know,’ he agreed with a heavy sigh. ‘I’ve been going on my instincts since I first laid eyes on O’Rourke. All I’m asking of you is to spread the word of Billy’s disappearance. Do you have a picture of him?’ he asked.

  Mother Gabriel nodded. ‘We take photographs of all the babies we put up for adoption,’ she answered.

  ‘Then please display the photograph of Billy in your church and ask parishioners if they’ve seen him. Keep the community aware of a missing baby boy,’ he begged. ‘And leave O’Rourke to me.’