Pontypridd 05 - Such Sweet Sorrow

by Catrin Collier

‘God help the business. And Papa’s café?’

  ‘Laura took care of it until a week ago. Then Trevor got a posting to a hospital in Sussex. He found rooms near the hospital so she took the baby down there to be near him.’

  ‘You closed our place in High Street!’

  ‘You haven’t changed have you, Ronnie? Still business before family.’

  ‘I spent years building up the cafés …’

  ‘And they’re all standing, and making a profit. Not as much as when you were in charge, but then there’s a war on. I put a girl into Papa’s old café in High Street. It was never that busy. I keep an eye on the two.’

  Propping his crutch against a table, he lifted down a chair and sat on it.

  ‘What am I doing standing here talking? You must be starved.’

  ‘I’m not sure I could eat anything.’ The driver had made three stops on the long journey down, but apart from coffee Ronnie hadn’t eaten or drunk anything. Even now, he felt queasy, nauseated by the rich smells of cocoa and fried food that lingered in the air.

  ‘I have some eggs hidden in the back, and …’

  ‘After what I’ve eaten for the last year, better make it dry toast and tea. I can’t keep much else down.’

  ‘Ronnie, I have so much to tell you.’

  ‘I know most of it. Papa drowned on the Arandora Star when they were shipping internees to Canada. Someone said the boat was torpedoed.’

  ‘That’s what we heard too, but Mama and the little ones are safe in Birmingham. They had to relocate to an area more than a hundred miles from the sea.’

  ‘I’m surprised any place is that far from the sea on this island.’

  ‘Tony’s in the army. He was wounded before Dunkirk. As far as we know he’s still stationed somewhere in this country, and Angelo …’

  ‘Was taken prisoner when France fell. Two sons in the army and they thought Papa was an enemy alien. What do we have to do to convince people we’re not Fascists?’

  ‘It’s not the people around here who need convincing but the government.’

  ‘I hear you’re married.’

  ‘William Powell last summer.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have married him if I’d been home. He’s nowhere near good enough for you.’

  ‘Then it’s just as well you weren’t around,’ she bit back tartly. ‘And before we go any further you may as well know Gina’s married too.’

  ‘What! She’s only sixteen.’

  ‘The same age Maud was when she married you. Anyway, she’s seventeen now. Her husband’s only a couple of years older than her. He’s a conscientious objector, so they sent him down the pit.’

  ‘Sensible fellow. I tried to opt out of the war, but I didn’t quite manage it.’

  ‘That covers everyone except you, Ronnie. We never thought you and Maud would get out of Italy once Mussolini came down on the side of the Germans …’

  She looked at her brother’s face. ‘Something’s happened to Maud, hasn’t it? You never would have left her otherwise. Ronnie …’

  ‘She’s dead, Tina.’ He’d meant to break the news gently, but now the moment had arrived, there didn’t seem any other way to tell her.

  ‘Oh, Ronnie! I’m sorry, so sorry.’ Memories of her brother’s wedding flooded into her mind. Had it really been only five years ago? So much had happened since then, it seemed like half a lifetime and another world away.

  Ronnie rose wearily to his feet. Wrapping his arms around his sister’s shoulders, he held her close while she sobbed hot, salt tears on to his ragged shirt. He would have given a great deal to have been able to cry with her. His heart had turned to stone the day Maud had died. Eighteen months later he was still too numb to weep.

  He began to wonder what he was doing in Pontypridd. He’d crawled home like a wounded animal needing to lick its sores. How had that corporal put it? ‘Anyone special you thinking of visiting?’ There was no one special person left in the world, not for him. He should never have allowed the British pilots he’d guided over the mountains into Switzerland to talk him into returning to England with them so he could draw maps for British Intelligence. He should have ignored the bullets in his leg and gone back to the hills and the Resistance. Better to have died fighting in Italy. That way at least he would have stood a chance of sharing Maud’s grave.

  ‘It’s more like midsummer than spring. Real holiday weather.’ Jane Powell slowed her steps as her husband hesitated in front of a park bench.

  ‘Lovely weather for the countryside. I’m not too sure about the city, though. If it’s like this now we’ll be able to fry eggs on the pavement in a week or two.’ Finally deciding that the bench commanded as fine a view of the small park as they were likely to get, and a better vista of the blitzed London suburbs that surrounded it than he desired, Haydn jammed his foot against the brake on the pram he’d been pushing and sat down.

  ‘And where do you suggest we get eggs other than powdered to fry?’

  ‘In Pontypridd. Plenty of people keep chickens there. Remember how cool it was in the woods around Shoni’s pond last August? It would be even prettier now, the bluebells would be out and -’

  ‘… and just as soon as you get leave we’ll go back there for a visit,’ Jane interrupted, deliberately ignoring yet another hint that she should take herself and the baby out of London and Hitler’s bomb path. Bending over the pram she folded back the covers and lifted up their eight-week-old daughter.

  Haydn was already holding out his arms. She suppressed a small smile of triumph as she handed him the shawl-wrapped bundle. It hadn’t been easy to fend off Haydn’s demands that she evacuate to his father’s house in Wales before Anne’s birth, but since the baby’s arrival he had become as malleable as bread dough – until last night.

  She wondered if he’d heard something in work that had prompted him to renew his badgering that she leave London for the comparative safety of Pontypridd. Usually all it took to weaken his resolve was for her to twine her arms around his neck, look into his eyes and plant a kiss on his lips, and if he still wavered, give him Anne to cuddle; but today, for some reason she hadn’t yet fathomed, he appeared impervious to her coaxings.

  ‘You could go ahead of me. I’ll follow as soon as I get leave.’

  ‘And travel on the train by myself with Anne? I’d never cope.’

  ‘Of course you would,’ he snapped with uncharacteristic brusqueness, closing his eyes against the horrific images that had haunted him since his bus had been held up next to a cordoned-off bomb site yesterday afternoon. Only three houses had been left standing in a sea of rubble that had been a heavily populated street a couple of months ago. While he’d sat on the top deck and idly watched ARP wardens and Home Guard veterans comb the wreckage for salvageable objects, a tin-hatted warden had emerged from the hole he’d been digging in, to blow his whistle. Just before the bus had moved off a pathetically small, dust-coated corpse had been lifted out of the crater. A body that had suddenly, unaccountably, become Anne’s in Haydn’s mind’s eye.

  The child must have lain there, forgotten and unmourned since the last bombing raid weeks ago. Haydn couldn’t help wondering about the parents. Had they been killed in the same raid, or was there a father fighting somewhere who carried a photograph of a wife and child he didn’t even know were dead? Had the child died instantly, or had it lived for hours, days even, trapped, frightened and alone, all the while slowly dying of thirst …

  He clutched Anne closer, shivering despite the sunshine. The nights had been quiet for so long they were almost getting used to the peace, but that didn’t mean the bombing had stopped. Now that the winter storms had died in the Channel, everyone was waiting for Hitler to invade. The precursor to the Nazis’ spring campaign would undoubtedly be a resumption of the blitz, and next time Anne might be the one buried beneath the ruins. It was a horrific scenario he hated himself for even daring to imagine, because Anne, like Jane, had become too precious to contemplate losing. He crossed his finge
rs superstitiously lest even the thought of such tragedy precipitate it.

  ‘The bombing could start again, and I’d never forgive myself if anything happened to Anne, or you,’ he murmured, softening his voice in the hope it would atone for his outburst.

  ‘Nothing is going to happen to either of us.’

  ‘How can you say that?’

  ‘Do you really think we’d be any safer in Pontypridd with Cardiff docks just down the road?’

  ‘They’re twelve miles away.’

  ‘And the munitions factories in Treforest?’ she whispered, after checking no fifth columnist was close enough to overhear their conversation. ‘And don’t bring up America again,’ she warned. ‘Not after that last ship of refugees was sunk by a V-boat.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to, but can’t you see you’d be safer in Pontypridd? No matter what, it has to be less of a target than London. Please, love, if you won’t go for your own sake, then go for Anne’s.’

  She moved closer to him, lifting the shawl from the baby’s face. ‘Do you think I’d ever put Anne at risk? I always go down the cellar the minute the siren sounds, and the walls are as thick as anything you’ll find in the underground, at least that’s what Mrs Allen says, and she should know. She’s lived in the place for over seventy years. We are better off down there than we would be in any Anderson or Morrison shelter.’

  ‘And if there’s a direct hit?’

  ‘Do you know the odds against that happening?’

  ‘It happens,’ he reiterated stubbornly.

  ‘If I’d gone to Wales when you’d wanted me to, Anne would have been born there. I doubt you’d have even been given leave to come down and see us.’

  ‘Of course I would have.’

  ‘A day or two at most, if anything. Your radio show is popular, you’re doing wonders for the morale of the troops. The powers that be won’t let you go until the war’s over, and by then Anne could be old enough to be married. Don’t you want to see your daughter grow up?’ she pleaded.

  ‘Her safety has to come first.’

  ‘Safe is with us. I want every advantage for our child that I never had, especially a family. And that means a father as well as a mother.’

  ‘Do you think I like the idea of you leaving?’ He wrapped his arm around Jane’s shoulders as he dropped a kiss on Anne’s forehead.

  ‘No. So that’s settled,’ she smiled triumphantly.

  ‘It is not.’

  ‘You just said you didn’t want us to go, I don’t want to, and Anne certainly doesn’t.’

  ‘Jane!’ he exclaimed in exasperation.

  ‘It’s time for her feed,’ she declared, effectively closing the argument. Taking the baby from his arms she held Anne’s face close to her own for a moment, before tucking her back into her pram. Refusing to be mollified, the baby fought free from the covers. Pounding the air with her small fists she screwed her face into the wrinkled, crimson ball that generally preceded an outburst.

  ‘She was perfectly happy where she was.’ Haydn kicked the brake free on the pram.

  ‘In her father’s arms? If you have your way she’ll have to get used to doing without your cuddles.’

  ‘I’d come down to see you every chance I’d get.’

  ‘That wouldn’t be very often when you work every day.’

  ‘I’d demand a weekend off a month,’ Haydn asserted unconvincingly, glancing at his watch. He had a busy afternoon ahead of him in the studio. Requests and letters from the troops to wade through with the researchers; an ENSA tour of the North African front to plan that he hadn’t dared mention to Jane – yet; three new songs to rehearse, and that was before he even began his four-hour broadcasting stint on the Overseas Service.

  When he’d been commissioned into the army as a second lieutenant purely on the strength of his singing voice and popularity, and ‘temporarily’ assigned to the BBC’s Overseas Service, the idea of talking to the men who were actually doing the fighting had been awesome and exciting, but familiarity had long since extinguished any sense of wonder; and since Anne’s arrival even the excitement had worn off. It wasn’t that he was disenchanted with his work, rather that he was more enchanted with family life. An enchantment that must have overcome his common sense, he reflected soberly as he pushed the pram towards the spot where the park gates would have been, if they hadn’t been salvaged for scrap iron. How else could he explain to himself, or his family, why he hadn’t frogmarched his pregnant wife to Paddington and put her on the first train to Wales when France had fallen and the blitz had started in earnest.

  ‘I really want you to go this time, Jane,’ he murmured, deciding that the dripping tap principle of wearing her objections down was the best option left open to him.

  ‘We’ll talk about it.’

  He remembered the tiny corpse. ‘There’s no more talking to be done.’

  ‘Just look at your daughter. How can you bear to send her away?’

  ‘Because I love her. And her mother’s not too bad either.’ He slipped his arm around Jane’s waist as they walked past the vegetable and potato beds that had replaced last year’s geraniums. ‘I hate working afternoons, but there’s nothing I can do about it. You promise, the minute the siren sounds …’

  ‘We’ll go down the cellar. But I can’t understand why you’re so edgy, there hasn’t been a raid in weeks. Besides, you’re the one taking all the risks by travelling through London, not us. We’ll be as safe as houses, won’t we, sweetheart?’ Jane rocked the pram handle in an attempt to still Anne’s whimpering.

  Haydn glanced up at the jagged, roofless houses silhouetted against the skyline like hollowed-out, rotted teeth. He wished Jane hadn’t used the hackneyed expression. It had an ironic ring to it now that so many of London’s buildings had been reduced to rubble.

  ‘Looks like we’ve had the quietest part of the day.’ Jane said the first thing that came into her head in an attempt to divert Haydn’s attention from the subject of evacuation. The park was filling up with people on lunch breaks, the streets outside clogging with queues that snaked out of the shops; all of London seemed to be engaged in the endless quest for increasingly rare foodstuffs, preferably off the ration books.

  ‘One of the advantages of Madam getting us up at the crack of dawn.’ He wheeled the pram across the road to the block that housed their two-roomed flat. When he had first arrived in London it had seemed comfortable. Even Jane had thought so before Anne had put in an appearance. Now he could only marvel that such a small scrap of humanity could commandeer such a vast expanse of living and storage space.

  Leaning on the handle, Haydn lifted the front wheels and manoeuvred the coach pram into the hallway. Distrusting the lift, Jane took the baby from the pram while he dragged it up the stairs to the first floor.

  ‘You have time for tea?’ she asked as they walked into the room that did duty as hall, living room and kitchen rolled into one.

  ‘Tea is about all I do have time for. I’ll make it while you see to Madam.’

  ‘I’m amazed you can even think of anything else after the breakfast you ate this morning.’ Jane carried Anne over to a Rexine-covered sofa, so firmly stuffed with horsehair its surface was as solid as the sideboard. She changed the baby while Haydn disappeared behind the curtain that hid the sink and cooker.

  The flat was blessed with a small bathroom. The sink was cracked and the bath had lost its enamel in places, but after Jane’s upbringing in orphanages and workhouses, she considered it the height of luxury. But with Anne already grizzling there wasn’t time to linger. She plunged the nappy into the bucket, washed her hands, unbuttoned her blouse, and was lifting Anne to her breast when Haydn reappeared with a tray loaded with cups, saucers, plates and the last two slices of an eggless sponge she had made two days ago.

  ‘Mock duck all right for supper?’ Jane pulled Anne back slightly to stop her from choking on the initial glut of milk.

  ‘I’d rather you ate early and went to bed in the cellar. You
look exhausted.’

  ‘It’s only this heat. After the winter it’s come as a shock.’ She gently caressed the small body pressed against her own, wiping away the froth of milk that spilled out of Anne’s mouth with a clean handkerchief. ‘Besides, cooking makes the time pass more quickly. I think I have enough dripping left to make some Welsh cakes.’

  ‘I’m not even going to ask what goes into mock duck, but please leave the carrots out of the Welsh cakes this time.’ Haydn walked over to Jane, unable to resist the temptation to stroke the baby’s soft, downy cheek with his little finger. Anne opened one deep blue eye and squinted at him sideways.

  ‘How can anyone say babies can’t see properly?’ he asked. Anne’s mouth relaxed; she loosened her hold on Jane’s nipple as she continued to stare at him. ‘If ever there’s a knowing look it’s that one.’

  ‘Don’t distract her. She won’t take her full feed, then she’ll get cross, wake again in half an hour and there’ll be no supper for either of us.’

  ‘Sorry.’ He returned to the table. ‘But you promise, no carrots, or any other peculiar ingredients in my Welsh cakes?’

  Jane stared at him, a tantalising smile curving the corners of her generous, full-lipped mouth, her eyes enormous dark pools in her sun-flushed face, reminding him exactly why he had fallen in love with her. ‘I have a recipe for pea puree pancakes.’

  ‘Now I know why the Germans are biding their time before invading. They’ve heard of Lord Woolton and they’re waiting until we all die from malnutrition or food poisoning.’

  ‘The kettle,’ she reminded.

  He dived behind the curtain and made the tea. When he turned around, Jane was lifting their daughter from her breast. Head lolling, milk bubbling on her lips, Anne was already asleep.

  ‘Can I put her down?’

  ‘If you don’t wake her.’

  Carrying Anne to the pram, he folded back the blankets and gently laid the baby on her side, tucking the covers securely around her small figure. ‘Shall I pour your tea?’

  ‘I’d better wash first.’ Jane returned to the bathroom and filled the sink with water. Haydn followed, standing behind her as she slipped off her blouse. ‘You looking to see if I’m getting fat?’ she asked as she sponged herself down.