An Army of Smiles

by An Army of Smiles (retail) (epub)

  Nan did not refer to her mother’s visit the following morning and Rosie made no attempt to discuss it, although she badly wanted to know why Nan had never told her about her mother’s attempts to contact her.

  It was the day Rosie was due to leave, to go to London and meet up with Ethel and Kate, that they returned to the subject that had kept them silent for several days. Nan opened the drawer. ‘I know I should have told you, Rosie dear. But at first you were too young and needed to settle. Then time passed and it was too late.’ She went out and closed the door leaving Rosie staring down at the open drawer.

  The letters were all brief, just asking how she was, sending her love and telling her a little about her life. Her work, where she lived, and later, her life without Geoff who had died but whom she had never married.

  Rosie learned that she taught needlework in a girls’ school, and enjoyed cycling with a club. There was so much Rosie had missed. There was no time then to read them all and she left them with Nan, who promised to keep them safe.

  She couldn’t wait to tell Ethel and Kate about her mother and she knew that once out of the inhibiting atmosphere of the house she had shared with Nan for so long, she would write to her mother and begin asking her questions.

  * * *

  When Ethel and Kate reached London, they had a few days before re-embarking to return to their unit, and when they met Rosie and reported to the office for papers, travel warrants and details of their route, they were told that they were not going back. Kate and Rosie were to report to an army camp somewhere in the south of England, to which they would be taken in an army lorry.

  Ethel had to wait to be told her destination. It was devastating to realize that the amazing luck that had kept them together since 1940 had finally failed them. They might be miles apart, they could even be in different countries – North Africa, Italy, Europe or wherever the long discussed Second Front finally happened. It was heartbreaking. They might not meet again until war ended and even then, when they returned to their normal, everyday lives, circumstances and destiny would need a serious nudge before they did.

  On their last evening together, they didn’t go out for one last fling but instead sat in the lounge of the small shabby hotel where they were staying, and talked. It was then that Kate and Ethel learned about Rosie’s brief and disappointing meeting with her mother.

  ‘I didn’t even know what she looked like,’ Rosie told them. ‘It’s so long ago, without even a faded snapshot to keep my memories alive. My imagination has built a picture that was nothing like the reality. I was disappointed at how ordinary she looked. She wasn’t beautiful and glamorous like Vivien Leigh or Alice Faye or…’ She frowned as she tried to explain. ‘She was just an ordinary mum. I expected her to be beautiful. Because Geoff stole her away from me, I imagined her so gorgeous and dazzling that he had to have her. In my foolish imagination he’d found her so irresistible he couldn’t bear to share her with anyone, not even me. But she was… I don’t know, just ordinary.’

  ‘How can you say she was ordinary, Rosie?’ Kate, ever the romantic, said. ‘That was so dreamy, like a story in a magazine. She must have been lovely. You could hardly judge, with her standing for a few minutes in Nan’s gas-lit living room.’

  ‘And scared half out of her wits having to face your Nan!’ Ethel added.

  ‘Scared?’ I hadn’t thought of her being scared.’

  ‘Think about it, facing the woman who thought you were unrepentantly hard, even cruel, having given up a child to follow a man you loved more. And preparing to meet that child and try to explain the years of absence. What’s that if it isn’t scary?’

  ‘I wonder how soon after she left that your Nan start hiding away her letters?’ Ethel asked curiously. ‘Perhaps she hasn’t ever stopped writing to you.’

  ‘In all these years. We moved about from place to place when I was small, she wouldn’t always have known where to find us,’ Rosie explained. ‘Yet she always did find us, at least it seems so from the number of letters Nan has, tucked away in that drawer.’

  ‘If it was me I’d have to write and ask her what has happened over the years, even if I didn’t tell Nan,’ Ethel said. ‘You did keep the address, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, and her name is still Dreen.’ Somehow that seemed important. A different name and it would have been more difficult to accept that she was her mother.

  Seeing Rosie begin a letter to her estranged mother made Ethel face the fact that her own mother, or the woman she called mother, needed to hear from her. She had to put aside her own feelings, go and show her mother that she cared, even if it was more duty than love. Then she shivered as she thought that her father might have recovered. She didn’t know anything about strokes. Could he have returned to full health? Could he be well again? Standing there with his red angry face, those bright blue eyes glaring at her and telling her she had to come home and not talk to Wesley or any other man? And worse, what if the story about him having a stroke was nothing more than a ruse to persuade her to go home?

  When she discussed it with Rosie and Kate, they tried to persuade her to go home during the few days she had left.

  ‘Nan has been ill and I didn’t know. At least you found out. If he dies before you see him, talk to him and make your peace, you’ll regret it. I know you will. Life’s so precarious.’

  ‘The bomb that damaged the shop might have killed Mam and Dad,’ Kate said earnestly. ‘I might never have seen them again.’

  Rosie nodded frantically in agreement. ‘And now there’s a chance to see my mother after all these years and perhaps get to know her and learn about myself, I’m so glad. I feel you should go, now, while you can.’

  ‘I don’t want to see my father ever again, if he dies I won’t feel a thing,’ Ethel insisted, although the words she uttered made her feel a ripple of superstitious fear. ‘And nothing anyone tells me will persuade me to walk back into that house. Right?’

  ‘Not even the chance to find out who your father is?’

  ‘And what about your brother Sid?’

  ‘I know where he is. He’s at home trying to help Mam keep the market garden going. As for Wesley,’ she added, thinking about him with poignant regret, ‘I’ve no idea what happened to him except that he clearly doesn’t want to see me.’

  ‘But you do know where to find your mother and father.’

  Ethel stubbornly shook her head. ‘Grandparents,’ she corrected with a harsh laugh. ‘I don’t know my father, and my mother’s dead.’

  After tearful goodbyes and promises to write, Kate and Rosie left Ethel on the station platform watching them boarding their train. As the guard put the whistle between his lips and raised his flag, she turned sharply and walked away.

  Watching them leave her had made Ethel decide that they were right and for a first step she would write to Mr and Mrs Bailey at the farm to ask about Sid – who was her uncle, she supposed sadly.

  ‘I can’t believe we won’t be together,’ Rosie sobbed as the train picked up speed. ‘Why does everything have to be so bloody!’

  Kate understood Rosie’s distress, realizing it was not all because of their parting from Ethel. Seeing her mother and wanting to meet again and talk to her had left her very tearful.

  ‘It isn’t for ever, Rosie,’ she coaxed. ‘You know how frequently we’re posted from one place to another, and we’re at least in the same country! We’ll meet during leave, that’s a certainty, and we can write. Cheer up, it isn’t for ever.’

  They were delayed for two weeks, as no one seemed very clear about their destination. They moved around covering vacancies due to leave breaks and sickness. Plans were announced then changed almost daily.

  Something was going on. There was an air of expectancy around the camps and a tightening up of security, but no one seemed willing to discuss the reason. Kate and Rosie guessed it had something to do with the Second Front which the British people were demanding and that the Russians needed, to take the burden o
f battle from them or at least ease it a little.

  Everyone was edgy, and around the camp fields had been confiscated from the local farmers and fenced off by the engineers. Buildings sprang up and large quantities of stores were delivered. The numbers of men and women were slowly increasing. They were allowed to leave camp, but were restricted in where they went, and passes and passwords were strictly adhered to.

  Fortunately their mail came through with remarkable speed. Vincent was still in the same area and there was a chance of he and Kate meeting up, which excited her and had her changing hair styles and choosing clothes in every spare moment, of which there were very few.

  New canteens were being opened and the girls were moved with very little notice to attend to the preliminary arrangements before being moved once again. The post followed them and Rosie heard from her mother, a cautious note suggesting that they could meet when she was next free. Nan’s parcels found them and they were sad that Ethel was not able to share them. Rosie constantly wondered about Baba, her love for him a gentle ache, but no news of him came through. The last she had heard was that he had been in North Africa and she wished she had stayed where they might have met. In her more melancholy moods she thought he was probably dead.

  Their permanent posting finally came and they learned that the airfield was a new one and the canteen very large. They eventually arrived at night in the middle of an air raid after a long uncomfortable ride in a heavy RAF lorry.

  They were taken to the shelter and it was there they spent their first night, hungry, tired and longing for a wash and a change of clothes. They woke to the sound of heavy planes taking off. ‘Lancaster bombers,’ they were told as they dragged their bags from the shelter and headed in the direction of their canteen. A voice behind them made them turn.

  ‘Come on, you two slackers. This is your manageress speaking and I want you to march like soldiers, not slouch like girl guides in a thunderstorm.’

  ‘Ethel!’ Kate shouted in delight. Rose squealed.

  ‘I’ve been promoted to manageress of this delightful holiday camp. What about that, eh?’

  They exchanged news as they began getting everything ready for the first teabreak, laughing in their delight at being together again.

  ‘Better conditions all around now I’m a manageress,’ Ethel whispered. ‘I’ve had to shout a lot, and the poor kitchen hands are scared stiff of me. I’ll soften up in a day or so, but it was very slack around here. No one had any idea what they were doing. New camp, new staff, chaos! Thank goodness you two are here, we’ll soon have them sorted out.’

  The kitchen had four cooks, seven kitchen hands and a few dogsbodies, who did the work no one else wanted to do, plus the occasional assistance of men on ‘jankers’ for some misbehaviour. To the kitchen hands’ delight and to everyone else’s dismay, in the few days before the canteen was fully operational, Ethel had made them change jobs occasionally to learn respect for people doing more lowly jobs: ‘Jobs which are,’ she reminded them, ‘as essential to the servicemen and women as the rest.’

  They had to wait for their accommodation to be made ready. They weren’t too surprised to discover they would be sleeping in a tent. ‘Our accommodation needing to be made ready? That sounds ominous,’ Rosie shivered. ‘Remember that first place? A cold tent occupied by Mrs Pompous and the canteen full of spiders as big as mice and mice that looked like rats!’

  ‘And Walter, the creep!’

  Ethel showed them around the kitchens and the preparation room where a group of girls similar to ones they remembered from years back were sitting around a pile of potatoes, peeling and cutting them up, singing as they worked. ‘This place needs a good sorting,’ she said, looking at the careless preparation. ‘Peeled and with the shoots dug out, and the potatoes cut to a uniform size,’ she said, in a tone that suggested it wasn’t the first time.

  Rosie and Kate pushed into the circle and began to help, starting off the singing with the Evelyn Laye number, ‘It’s a Lovely Day Tomorrow, Tomorrow is a Lovely Day’. The frowns on the faces as they showed resentment at Ethel’s criticism faded, and the voices rang out as Ethel smiled and left them.

  Once everything was as clean and orderly as they liked it, and still having to wait to be told where to find the tent in which they would sleep, Kate sat in the canteen and wrote to Vincent and dreamed verbally about their reunion until even the placid Rosie told her to ‘Put a sock in it!’

  ‘I wonder if we’ll see Albert,’ Ethel mused.

  ‘Don’t you start,’ Rosie sighed.

  ‘Or Baba Morgan?’ Rosie’s heart gave a painful leap. She could never tell them how she felt.

  ‘Or the dreaded Walter,’ Ethel added with a groan.

  ‘I can’t decide whether or not to meet my mother,’ Rosie told them. ‘She wants us to get together on my next leave.’ They listened while she explained again how she felt about her need to support Nan, and to avoid the woman who had abandoned her in favour of the new man in her life. There was strong loyalty for Nan, who had cared for her as far back as she remembered, together with the confusion of wanting to talk to her mother, get to know her and to find out who she, Rosie Dreen, really was.

  ‘I’m only half a person,’ she told them.

  ‘You eat enough for two!’ Ethel retorted with a laugh.

  ‘I know a lot about my father even though I don’t remember him,’ Rosie went on. ‘Nan filled in the gaps for me to know my father, so many photographs and dozens of stories, but my mother is a stranger. All Nan said about her was that she had abandoned me for this man, Geoff, who didn’t like children. I want to know my mother, understand the half of me that’s her.’

  ‘Forget her,’ Ethel said firmly. ‘You’re expecting too much. A “Pandora’s box”, meeting her could be. You never know where it will lead.’

  ‘I think you should meet,’ Kate said. She looked at the canteen ceiling, starry-eyed. ‘It’s real romantic, your mother giving up her first-born for the man she loved.’

  ‘First born? D’you mean I might have stepsisters or stepbrothers?’ Rosie squealed.

  ‘Oh, Kate, did you have to start her off again?’ Ethel laughed.

  ‘Even if they didn’t marry she might have…’ Kate stopped, remembering the situation Ethel had found herself in, and the baby she had lost.

  Ethel appeared not to have noticed as she said, ‘Seriously, Rosie, you shouldn’t build up your hopes like this. Too great an expectation of what your mother could bring into your life will only lead to greater disappointment. Expect the worst, it’s safer.’

  Kate agreed, guessing that Ethel was trying to avoid unhappiness for their friend. It was an indication of their closeness that she didn’t need explanations.

  ‘Come on, you lot, let’s get us bedded down for the night,’ a young corporal called.

  ‘You should be so lucky!’ they chorused.

  Their accommodation was a bell tent which they shared with three others and a minuscule heater. Coming from North Africa, even with the weeks at home in which to acclimatize, this was still a shock. But after only three nights sleeping in the cold, uncomfortable place that smelled of dampness and old socks, they moved to a Nissen hut where they at least had a ‘donkey’ to heat the room and were able to scrounge extra blankets.

  The canteen had been recently decorated and smelled of paint and disinfectant. It was a large one, offering the usual snacks plus hot meals of sausage, rissoles or pasty with chips and the already disparaged spam, plus huge quantities of baked beans. There was also a bar selling alcohol and rationed cigarettes and chocolate, as well as the usual net bar in which the men and women could shop for their necessities. There was a stage complete with a piano on which impromptu concerts were sure to be held.

  On their first day there, to Kate’s delight, they received a quota of make-up. Kate had made arrangements to meet Vincent later in the week and was counting the hours in great excitement. Meanwhile she happily practised with the new colours as sh
e prepared for their date.

  On a rota system with other members of the staff, Ethel, Kate and Rosie were on call during their rest hours. When the bombers were due to set off on a mission they were there to prepare boxes of rations for the crews of the bombers to take, one for each man, containing sandwiches, cakes and also fruit and chocolate, which were not available to members of the public. These flyers were special and they were treated so.

  As on other airfields, Ethel and Rosie and Kate used to count the heavy bombers out and wait for them to come back, afraid to count, afraid not to. It was hard not to be aware that some of the men they had been talking to, laughing with, just hours before, would never return.

  Kate watched them leave, thinking of one of the bomb-aimers on one of the huge B17s, the Flying Fortresses. She listened to the engines as the planes took off and wondered if Vincent was safe.

  Letters came through easily now they were back in Blighty, and after a few weeks, at the end of March, they were given a weekend off, with extra warnings about the seriousness of careless talk. Ethel had arranged to meet Albert, Kate had spent all her money illegally buying clothing coupons and purchasing smart new clothes ready for the long awaited reunion with Vincent, and Rosie told a lie and said she was going home to see Nan.

  As she saw Ethel and Kate off on the bus taking them into the town, Rosie held the most recent letter from her mother in which she had arranged to meet her. She put on her greatcoat then took it off and repeated the movements at least five times, unable to decide whether or not she wanted to go.

  When the last bus to pass the camp that morning was in sight coming through the lanes, rumbling slowly towards her, she almost ran back through the heavily guarded gates, but instead she jumped on, found a seat far from the other excited passengers who had waited with her, and sat staring at nothing at all until they reached the busy town. She could always change her mind before she reached the café where they were to meet, she told herself. The indecision lasted throughout the journey and continued as her feet took her towards her destination. I won’t go. I need to go. I can manage without her. I owe her the chance to explain. She doesn’t deserve that chance. So it went on.