We've Come to Take You Home

by Susan Gandar

  For a moment she believed her own lie. She heard footsteps on the stairs, the door opened and there was her mother. But then the feeling of control slipped away leaving her naked to the truth she had been trying so hard to avoid. Her mother was asleep upstairs and, she, Sam, was sitting, very alone and very drunk, at the kitchen table.

  She walked out into the hallway, up the stairs and along the landing to her parents’ bedroom. She knocked on the door, nothing, and knocked again, much louder, again nothing. She opened the door.

  ‘Mum…’

  She groped her way across the room.

  ‘Mum?’

  Her mother was lying, fully dressed, on top of the duvet. Her face was blotched and her eyes were puffy. In her hand was a scrunched up paper tissue. Several others lay scattered over the bed and on the floor. Sam stepped back.

  What good would be done in waking her mother up? What was the point in going over and over something which had already happened; even if her parents hadn’t had the argument, her mother hadn’t told her father to leave, he would still have left for the airport, the girl would still have walked out in front of his car and he would still be hooked up to machines in the intensive care unit. Nothing would be altered. Nothing would be changed.

  She crept out of the bedroom, closing the door behind her. She crept back along the corridor, down the stairs and into the kitchen. She picked up the bottle of wine and emptied its contents, every single last drop, into her glass and opened a second bottle.

  EIGHTEEN

  May 1917

  THE INSIDE OF THE compartment crashed to black. She screamed. And then it was daylight again. The train was still thundering on and the young soldier sitting next to her was smiling.

  ‘Have to get used to ‘em, love, tunnels, there’s lots of ‘em between here and London.’

  Jess and her mother had always stopped to wave at the trains thundering past on the other side of the river, north to London and south to the coast. But she had never been on one, not until that morning.

  She pushed her way into the carriage, along the corridor, into a compartment and down onto a seat. Outside, villages, fields and valleys were soon replaced by houses, chimneys and factories. And the colour of the countryside, the blue of the sky, the green of the fields, the pink of the blossom on the trees, was replaced by a dirty grey. The sky was grey. The houses were grey. Even the people were grey.

  But Clapham Junction station wasn’t grey: it was black. The air was full of soot and it smelt so bad it hurt to breathe. There were people everywhere, scurrying around like ants, going upstairs and downstairs, into tunnels and out of tunnels. The platforms went on and on, stretching off forever into the distance.

  Jess stood there, holding tight onto her suitcase, doing exactly what her mother had told her to do; get off, stand on the platform, don’t move, not to worry, the Major would soon find her. That had been half an hour ago. The train on which she had arrived had pulled out. A second one had pulled in and was already pulling out. And still there was no sign of the Major.

  Jess took the letter her mother had given her out of her pocket. It was from the Major and his wife and printed on it, at the top, was an address: Eaton Villa, Glebe Road, London SW11. Her mother insisted that she should have it ‘just in case’. Was ‘just in case’ waiting for half an hour on a platform with no sign of the Major? Had they forgotten her?

  Her suitcase was getting heavy. Her mother had told her not to put it down; it would only get stolen. She put the case down and sat on it. If someone wanted to steal her case they would have to steal her too.

  ‘Jessica? Jessica Brown?’

  A big man, completely bald, arms swinging, was marching down the platform towards her.

  ‘Explosion last night at a munitions factory in east London. Seventy-three dead, hundreds injured. They’re still digging them out…’

  The Major picked up her case and marched off. She ran behind him, along the platform, down a flight of steps and into a tunnel. More steps, another tunnel, and they were outside the station.

  A car, if one came into the village, had been regarded as something to be kept well away from; you couldn’t trust them not to explode. But now, right in front of where she was standing, there they were, hundreds of them crawling up and down the road like a mass of giant beetles.

  She’d never seen anything like it. Cars and horses pulling carts, and strange-looking things which looked like very tall cars, with people sitting both inside and on top, were all jostling for space along a narrow stretch of road. And she’d never heard so much noise. At home, any travel or transport had always been done by horse and cart. The carts, like the ones here, had big iron-shod wheels but they’d made hardly a sound clip-clopping through muddy farmyards and down country lanes. But in London, those same iron-shod wheels going over stone cobbles made enough noise to waken the dead.

  There was an angry honking of horns as the Major stepped off the kerb. He marched, weaving in and out of the traffic, without hesitating, towards the other side of the road. Jess stood there, frozen, as a car crawled by just inches from where she was standing. She took a deep breath and stepped off the kerb. A second car crawled past. A person was driving it, and there may well have been people sitting inside it, but all she could see was its shiny, polished metal.

  She continued forward. The Major was alive and well, and still marching, and so was she. A large cart drawn by two horses, loaded up with barrels, rumbled towards her, sparks flying from its metal wheels. She should wait for it to pass. But the Major had already reached the pavement and was now striding off down the street. She walked out in front of the cart. If she hurried, didn’t hesitate, she would make it. One step, two steps, but just as she’d reached the middle of the road, her feet slid out from underneath her.

  She crashed down, face first, onto the wet cobblestones. The cart wasn’t stopping. It wasn’t even slowing down. She would be crushed to a pulp as the metal clad wheels rolled, without stopping, over her shattered bones.

  A hand tugged at her arm. She was dragged her up onto her feet. She was pulled forward, out of the way of the cart, round the back of a car, round the front of a second car and up onto the pavement on the other side of the street. Before she could say thank you, the barefooted boy wearing the ragged remains of a red, grey and tartan waistcoat was back, darting in and out of the traffic, bucket in hand, scooping up horseshit.

  She struggled to keep up, sweating inside the heavy coat, her new boots pinching, as the Major marched ahead. They passed a baker, a butcher, a tobacconist, a draper and a milliner. The baker and butcher had their shutters down. Other shops, although still open, had windows which had been boarded up.

  The queues of people waiting to buy food back home in her village had been long but the queues they were walking past now, here in London, snaked out of the shop, along the street and round the corner. It was impossible to tell where one queue ended and another began. And no one was talking to anyone. The women were just standing there, hollow-eyed, sunken-faced, their shoulders drooping, one in front of the other, all dressed either in black or grey, waiting their turn.

  A shopkeeper, sleeves rolled up, a long white apron tied round his waist, came out of a grocer’s shop and said something she couldn’t hear. The queue lurched forward. A group of women started shouting. Others started screaming. Two women prodded and poked him in the chest forcing him back, step by step, towards the doorway. A woman picked up a stone. She hurled it at the shop window. There was a loud crack, followed by silence, and then glass exploded out onto the street. Jess had heard talk, at home in the village, of food riots in the cities. Now she was seeing one.

  ‘Fighting on the streets, next thing there’ll be a revolution, like in Russia. Damned Bolsheviks…’

  She followed the Major right into a narrow street. Houses were lined up, shoulder to shoulder, on both sides of the road. There was not an inch of space between them. The cottage where her family lived may have been poor, with o
nly one room, but there was nobody, to their left, right or opposite, watching and listening to everything they were doing. And they had a garden, all planted up with vegetables, beans, onions and potatoes, and flowers, like her mother’s blue cornflowers, and when you walked down the path, and out through the gate, there were fields, and hedgerows and trees. Not grey stone and red brick.

  At the end, facing directly towards them, was a tall building, also red brick. The roof had fallen in. All the windows had been blown out and the walls, the ones that still remained, looked as though they were about to collapse. A child’s boot lay abandoned amongst the broken glass and brick dust covering the ground. The Major stopped. He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket.

  ‘There was an air raid. The teachers took the children down to the basement, to the infants’ classroom, where they would be safe. The bomb went straight through the roof, into the empty boys’ classroom, down through the empty girls’ classroom, and into the infants’ classroom where all the teachers and children were sheltering.’

  The Major blew on his nose long and hard.

  ‘Eighteen dead, more than a hundred injured.’

  The war had always been in France. But now it was happening here at home. The white plane, with the black crosses painted on the underside of its wings; she now understood why her father had ordered her back to the cottage. But a thatched roof and mud walls wouldn’t be much protection if one, single bomb could rip apart a solid, brick-built building like this.

  The Major stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket. He picked up her suitcase and marched off. She followed him down more streets lined with houses; Ebbs Road, Honeywell Road, right into Hillier Road and then, finally, left into Glebe Road.

  She stared up at the Major’s house. Eaton Villa was like nothing she’d seen before. With its soaring turrets, pointed arches and snarling stone lions, it looked more like a church than a family home.

  ‘My wife’s never recovered from losing our two oldest boys.’

  The Major put his key in the lock.

  ‘To lose them both within a month of each other, both in the fighting in France, was just too much. It broke her heart.’

  The Major turned the key. The door opened.

  ‘The house is too large for just the two of us and with no help it has been difficult to keep things as we would like. Getting the letter from your mother was a blessing.’

  She followed the Major into the hallway. She stopped, her mouth open, staring up in astonishment, at the vaulted ceiling, the jewel-coloured tiled floor and the glowing wood-panelled walls. The house, from the outside, looked like a church. Inside, it was a castle.

  NINETEEN

  ‘YOU PICK UP THE receiver and you say, “The Osborne household.”’

  Jess had heard about telephones. She knew they existed, like she knew India and elephants and tigers existed in some far distant land, but she had never expected to find herself living in a house that actually had one.

  ‘We have gas down in the kitchen, but in the main part of the house, where the family live…’

  The Major’s wife clicked a switch. The hallway was flooded with light.

  ‘We also have electricity, whenever we want, day or night.’

  Her father had called her mother his ‘Little Sparrow’. She had brown hair and brown eyes, was shorter than most women, and used to be, what her father described with a wicked smile and a glint in the eye, well-rounded. She also never stopped moving, hopping and pecking, from one job to the next: washing, cleaning, cooking, working hard, day and night, to look after her family.

  But if Jess’ mother had been her father’s ‘Little Sparrow’ then the Major’s wife would have to be her husband’s ‘Big, Fat Chicken’. Or even ‘Big, Fat Turkey’. Jess had never seen a woman so large. And it wasn’t just her body. It was the clothes, the yards and yards of heavy black material trimmed with lace, the skirts and underskirts and petticoats, and who knows what else, sweeping up the staircase behind her.

  ‘In other houses, it is usual for maids to turn and face the wall whenever a member of the family passes by. But here, in our smaller, more relaxed household, keeping your eyes down and not speaking unless spoken to will be perfectly acceptable.’

  The first landing was lit by a narrow stained-glass window. An enormous pot, containing a small tree, stood to the left of a table covered with a tapestry rug. A heavy, carved wooden chair sat on either side.

  ‘The main bedroom, the Major’s dressing room and this…’

  The Major’s wife opened a third door. A trough, as wide as it was tall, stood on what looked like clawed feet in the centre of a large, white tiled room.

  ‘You put the plug in the hole, like this, carefully, so you don’t scratch the enamel, and then you turn on the taps. The right hand one is for hot water. The left one is for cold water.’

  When her father had been at home, and there had been enough money to buy coal to light a really good fire, they’d had a bath every month. Her father would draw up four or five buckets of water from the well. Her mother would heat it in a large, black metal cooking pot over the fire. When it was hot, but not boiling, her mother and father would lift the pot off the range and pour the water into the hipbath. Her father would be the first in, then her mother, then Jess and, finally, her baby brother. It had to be in and out, really fast, if the last person into the bath was to get any hot water.

  The Major’s wife opened a fourth door. It was another white-tiled room. But this one was much smaller and it contained a throne-like seat.

  ‘You lift up the lid and you sit down. And when you have finished you pull this.’

  The Major’s wife tugged on the chain hanging from the metal box high up on the wall.

  ‘Not too hard – you don’t want to break it.’

  There was a loud clanking. Water gushed and swirled down into the toilet.

  ‘Don’t forget to put down the lid. The Major is very particular about his lid.’

  At home, they’d had a privy at the bottom of the garden. Outside it looked pretty, all covered with honeysuckle and roses. But, inside, however often her mother swept and however hard she scrubbed, and however often the waste was emptied, it always smelt. But here, at Eaton Villa, there were no smells; all the waste was washed away, in pipes going down, through and then underneath the house.

  At home, they’d had to clean themselves up with whatever they could get hold of, scraps of old newspaper, sometimes handfuls of hay. But here there was a special box, attached to the tiles on the wall, containing sheets of hard, shiny paper.

  ‘You buy it at the shops – Bronco – we must never run out.’

  They were now on the top floor of the main part of the house.

  ‘This was Peter’s bedroom. And this was William’s.’

  The drawing room, the dining room, even the main bedroom, were all crammed with pictures and ornaments. She’d never seen so many bits and pieces. There was not an inch of space that wasn’t covered with some bit of china or glass. But these two rooms, at the top of the house, were empty except for a bed, unmade, a wardrobe and a chair. Anything that could possibly hold a memory had been stripped out.

  ‘And this is Tom’s…’

  The third and smallest bedroom was different. It had pictures and books and there was a pile of shirts, ironed and neatly folded, lying on a bed made up with sheets, blankets and pillows.

  ‘And this is the nursery…’

  White walls, a table, four chairs, three of them child-sized, two cupboards, a guard in front of the fire and bars securely fixed at the windows.

  ‘When Tom, our youngest son is back from France, he’ll get married and start a family and the house will go back to being the happy home it used to be…’

  Hills she was used to climbing but not stairs. And the next flight was very narrow and very steep. Another door and they were standing in a low-ceilinged, narrow corridor running under the length of the roof.

  ‘This is where all the s
ervants slept. As well as your mother we had a cook, Mrs Johnson, and a scullery maid, Mary, and a nursemaid, Lucy.’

  They stopped outside a door at the end of the attic corridor.

  ‘This was your mother’s room.’

  It had a sloping ceiling and a window tucked away under the eaves. There was a narrow, iron bed with a cotton coverlet, a wardrobe, a wooden chest and a washstand with a bowl and jug. A strip of carpet partly covered the black-painted wooden floorboards.

  ‘Put on this brown working dress and apron when you get up in the morning. You wear it when you’re doing the dirty work. You will need to get most of that done, lighting the range, laying the fires, before you serve breakfast. You put on the black dress and the white cap and apron before serving lunch. There’s two of each, one on and one for the wash, and there’s another black dress for best. You will find some underwear, two vests, two pairs of knickers, two pairs of stockings and a corset, in the chest.’

  She’d only had one dress at home although you could hardly call it that. It had two sleeves and a hole for her neck and it was made up of patches taken from her mother’s old clothes all sewn together. And now she had five dresses, all clean and new and crisp, hanging up on hangers in her very own wardrobe. They’d never had money for underclothes, vests or knickers, you just went without, but now she had both, two of each, and two pairs of stockings and a corset.

  A book lay on the bed.

  ‘Study this carefully, in detail, in the evenings once your work is done. Mrs Beeton will tell you everything you need to know in order to fulfil your duties efficiently.’

  It was nearly as thick as the family bible her mother kept on the mantelpiece at home.

  ‘Unpack and change and then come straight down to the kitchen. The Major likes dinner to be served prompt at eight o’clock. Not a minute later.’