Home for Christmas

by Annie Groves

  ‘If you’ve found a bomb in your garden, missus, then it’s going to be at least three days before anyone can get to have a look at it,’ the other man told her in a war-weary voice. ‘The bomb disposal lot lost four men yesterday trying to diffuse a five-hundred-pounder.’

  ‘Olive, Mrs Robbins,’ Sergeant Dawson corrected himself as he emerged from the post, putting his helmet on as he did so.

  ‘I’m sorry to bother you, Sergeant Dawson.’ Olive moved slightly away from the others as she told him quietly, ‘It’s that boy, the one you were talking about after church. He’s in my kitchen, and I thought . . .’

  ‘Of course. I’ll come round now. I’ll just get my coat. Back in a jiffy, lads,’ the sergeant called out to the other men, diving back into the post and re-emerging pulling on a heavy great coat.

  ’In your kitchen, you say?’ he said to Olive as they set off to her house.

  ‘I’d left the back door open and my dinner on the table. I suppose it was too much temptation for him, poor boy. I’ve never seen anyone wolf down food as fast as he did. He is so thin and, like you said, sleeping rough. It can’t go on. I’ve tried to reassure him that his father will be informed where he is by the authorities—’ Olive broke off as she saw the lace curtains in Nancy’s front room windows twitch as they walked past. ‘I think Nancy has seen us. She’ll want to know what’s going on.’

  Although the sergeant didn’t say anything Olive could see from his expression that he didn’t have a very high opinion of her neighbour. Olive wished she had the courage to gently warn him about the gossip Nancy had tried to spread about him, but in view of the nature of Nancy’s unfounded gossip Olive felt that it wasn’t a subject she could raise without causing them both embarrassment.

  Unlocking the door to number 13, Olive told the sergeant, ‘I left him in the kitchen, locked in. I’ve brought Sergeant Dawson, Barney,’ she called as she opened the kitchen door only to turn to the sergeant in dismay. The kitchen window was open and Barney gone – along with the rest of her biscuits.

  ‘I’m so sorry. I should have brought him with me, but I didn’t want Nancy to see him and start asking questions.’ Start complaining that the boy was a thief and should be punished was what Olive really meant. ‘Now I’ve wasted your time.’

  ‘He can’t have gone very far. I’ll check the gardens.’

  Olive unlocked the back door. ‘I’ll help you. He won’t have gone next door to Nancy’s.’

  ‘Looks like he’s gone this way,’ the sergeant informed her, pointing out the trail of biscuit crumbs here and there on the path that led down the garden.

  ‘He can’t have got over the wall at the back.’ Olive looked across to her neighbours at number 14, and then back at the sergeant, who raised his finger to his lips and pointed to the door to the Anderson shelter, which was slightly ajar.

  Nodding her head to show that she understood, Olive stayed silent whilst Sergeant Dawson opened the door.

  Barney had concealed himself pretty well underneath one of the bunks, but not well enough. The toe of a worn shoe and an unfastened shoelace betrayed his whereabouts.

  ‘Come on, out of there,’ Sergeant Dawson demanded as he bent down to drag him gently but firmly from his hiding place. ‘You’re coming with me, my lad.’

  ‘I wasn’t doing nuffink wrong,’ Barney protested. ‘I dunno what she’s told you, but it was her that said I could eat her dinner.’

  ‘You should be thinking yourself lucky it was Mrs Robbins’ house you went into, young Barney, and not someone else’s, and thanking her, ’cos if it had been someone else, right now it could be theft I’m here to talk to you about, instead of trying to help you.’

  ‘I didn’t mean no harm. I was hungry and them biscuits she’d made smelled that good. Please don’t send me to prison, Sergeant.’

  The thin face was screwed up with genuine fear and Olive was filled with fresh concern for him.

  ‘I don’t want to press charges against him, Sergeant,’ she insisted. ‘It’s a proper home he needs, not prison.’

  ‘Do you hear that, Barney? I hope you’re going to thank Mrs Robbins for her kindness?’

  ‘Thank you, missus,’ Barney obliged in a small voice.

  ‘What’s going to happen to him, Sergeant?’ Olive asked quietly, as they walked back to the house, Sergeant Dawson keeping a firm eye on Barney, who was several feet in front of them.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted, keeping his voice equally low. ‘Like you said, a good home with someone to keep an eye on him, someone who cares about the lad, is what he needs. I’ll put in a good word for him with the authorities, but it’s up to them where they send him.’

  ‘Perhaps his father could be given compassionate leave to come home and reassure him that he won’t lose touch with him,’ Olive suggested.

  Sergeant Dawson nodded before lengthening his stride to catch up with Barney.

  Watching a little later as Sergeant Dawson escorted Barney down the Row, the sergeant’s hand resting on the boy’s shoulder in a way that was more paternal than imprisoning, Olive wondered yet again just how Nancy could be so mean as to spread unwarranted gossip about their neighbour, even if he had offended her.

  Sally rubbed a weary hand over her eyes. Even though it was over a week now since the train crash, she was still being woken from her much-needed sleep by awful nightmares, and not just about the crash itself.

  Despite Olive’s kindness to her and the company of the girls, she felt dreadfully alone. Images of the small family gathered round her mother’s grave found their way inside her head to torment her, no matter how hard she tried to keep them out of it. They had looked so close, the three adults, her father and Morag so protective of their child, and Callum protective of them. If she had died in the carnage of the train’s wreckage who would truly have mourned her? Who would have wept for her and felt that their life would be empty without her in it? Who cared about her and loved her with the quality of love she had seen so clearly existed between the three people who had caused her so much pain?

  Tomorrow was her day off but she would rather be working, she admitted. At least then she couldn’t think about her own misery. She rubbed her eyes again as she crossed the hospital foyer and then came to a halt of astonishment as she saw George coming towards her. At the sight of his face she felt a welling up of emotion. Dear, kind, reliable George. Her George. If he had been with her when she had visited her mother’s grave there would have been no need for her to run from the unbearable sight of other people’s shared intimacy and happiness. With George she would have had the protective cloak of her own shared intimacy with him to wrap around herself. The unfamiliar intensity of her emotions now made Sally feel slightly dizzy and light-headed.

  ‘I had to come and see you. Letters just aren’t the same,’ George told her earnestly.

  She’d written to him to tell him what had happened, of course, and he’d written back expressing his concern, but their letters had been practical common-sensical missives, and not emotional outpourings.

  ‘George,’ was all Sally could say, close to tears, but she managed a smile as he reached for her hand.

  ‘You’ve lost weight,’ he told her.

  ‘I haven’t felt much like eating since the accident,’ Sally admitted.

  ‘Come on.’ Holding her hand, George led her out of the hospital, and then hailed a taxi, telling the driver, ‘The Savoy, please.’

  ‘The Savoy?’ Sally queried astonished.

  ‘Afternoon tea,’ George explained. ‘You need feeding up, and I . . . I need to talk to you, and it’s too cold for the park.’

  ‘We could go to a Lyons restaurant,’ Sally suggested, her naturally thrifty soul worried about him spending his hard-earned money on somewhere as expensive as the Savoy, but George turned his head away from her so that Sally had to strain to hear him.

  ‘Things have changed, Sally, and there’s something I have to tell you.’

  His words, so u
nexpected, felt like a sledgehammer blow against her heart, driving the breath from her lungs, and filling her with anxiety. His manner towards her was distant, a yawning space between them as he sat as far away from her as possible, when right now what she wanted more than anything else was for him to take her in his arms with masterful disregard for the proprieties, and kiss her senseless whilst he told her that he couldn’t bear them being apart. In short, Sally admitted, what she wanted was for George to exhibit the kind of behaviour that, prior to the accident she would have denied she could ever want. But now, more than anything, she wanted to be protected and cherished, and loved.

  But that wasn’t what George was here for. She could tell from his withdrawn manner that he had something on his mind.

  Dismayed, Sally could only sit tensely in the taxi, feeling as though a blow were about to fall on her as it pulled up in the entrance to the hotel.

  Sally, like the others, had heard all about Dulcie’s visit to The Ritz in the company of her new American beau, but she felt no sense of excitement or triumph herself as she and George were ushered into the luxuriously appointed foyer by its uniformed doorman.

  Nor did she pay any attention to the elegantly dressed women already seated to take tea, their fur coats discarded on the banquettes and chairs surrounding the tables, the discreet hum of refined female voices mingling with the expensive sound of china cups touching china saucers. All Sally’s attention was concentrated on George.

  Again unlike Dulcie, Sally was relieved when they were shown to a table that was tucked away out of direct public view, her tension growing as she had to wait for the ritual of giving and receiving their order to be got through, followed by the pouring of their tea before she could finally be alone with George.

  And yet, instead of asking him why he had brought her here, to her own shame at her cowardice Sally then started to ask George about his new job, for all the world as though he hadn’t said those weighted words to her in the taxi, she admitted, as he let her ask.

  ‘It’s partly because of what I’ve seen and learned whilst I’ve been there that I’m here today, Sally,’ George told her quietly. ‘The men – boys, no more than that in many cases – come in with the most dreadful disfiguring wounds, wounds that rob them of the futures they had expected to have. So many of them have regrets not about what they have done but what they haven’t done. That has made me think . . . it’s made me see . . . Life is so precious. Happiness, and love are so fragile.’ He paused whilst Sally’s heart thumped heavily into her ribs with dread as she waited for the knife to fall, the words to be spoken that would end their relationship and set George free to find the happiness he had obviously decided did not lie with her.

  ‘The thing is, Sally . . . Oh God,’ George swore. ‘I’m just no good at this. I’d thought that if we came here, somewhere romantic that somehow . . .’

  Somewhere romantic?

  Sally’s heart was still thudding but for a different reason now, its beat swinging wildly between hope and a fear of believing in that hope.

  ‘I know we said that we’d wait, that we’d be sensible, that there’s a war on, but, Sally . . .’ George reached for her hand beneath the table and Sally let him take it. ‘. . . I don’t want to be sensible Sally, not after coming so close to losing you, and I damn well don’t want to wait living with the fear that because of this war we might never . . . Sally, will you marry me?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, George, I will,’ Sally promised him in a weakly exhaled breath of giddy joy that brought tears to her eyes.

  Somehow George was sitting next to her and then he was kissing her and she was kissing him back, and it was every bit as passionate and exciting as she had longed for it to be.

  ‘I love you so much,’ George told her. ‘When I got your letter telling me about the train, and with what I see every day at the hospital, I knew that despite what we’d agreed I had to ask you to marry me.’

  ‘Oh, George.’

  ‘You’re crying.’

  ‘Because I’m so happy. I was afraid that you were going to tell me that if was over between us,’ Sally admitted.

  ‘Never. How could you think that?’

  ‘I don’t know. I was afraid of losing you.’

  ‘Oh, my precious love, that could never happen. There’s a ring,’ George said, his voice cracking slightly. ‘My grandmother’s. She left it to me but if you don’t care for the idea—’

  ‘I love it,’ Sally assured him truthfully. ‘And I’ll love the ring as well. Knowing it was your grandmother’s will make it even more special.’

  ‘I hoped you’d say that. Oh, Sally.’

  Sally squeezed his fingers as she watched him fight to get his feelings under control.

  ‘I’ll write to my parents and ask them to send it. It won’t come in time for us to get engaged at Christmas but we could make an announcement.’

  ‘No,’ Sally explained, ‘Agnes and Ted are planning to get engaged officially over Christmas. Ted doesn’t earn very much and he gives most of what he does earn to his mother. Getting engaged formally will be a big thing for them because they’ve had to wait, and I don’t want to take the shine off that for them by us announcing our engagement at the same time. Besides,’ she added truthfully, ‘it will be nice to keep it to ourselves for a while: our special secret that we can share. I just wish . . .’ Sally bit her lip, then went on huskily, ‘I just wish that my mother could have known about you and me, George.’

  ‘Maybe she does,’ he told her gruffly. ‘And if she does I hope she knows, too, that I’ll look after you for her, Sally.’

  Another shared look of an emotion that went too deep for words was exchanged between them.

  ‘I don’t want a long engagement,’ George said.

  ‘Neither do it,’ Sally agreed.

  They smiled at one another, hesitant uncertain but proud smiles, both knowing that they had taken their first steps down a path that would be theirs to share.

  ‘How long can you stay in London? If you haven’t got a room I think that Olive would probably let you sleep on her front room sofa.’

  ‘I’ve got to go back this evening. I had to barter my next day off with my opposite number just to get up here. We’re always busy, but the recent bombing raids over Germany have meant that we’re getting an increasing number of new patients. The work Mr McIndoe is doing is marvellous, Sally. He’s a genius, a miracle worker when he operates, but there’s more to it than skin grafts and rebuilding badly burned and damaged faces. Mr McIndoe believes in treating the whole person. He says that there’s no point in rebuilding a chap’s face if his desire to live has also been shattered because of what his injuries have done to him emotionally. I’m not very good at explaining the breadth and depth of what he’s trying to achieve. You’ve got to come down and see for yourself.’

  ‘I’d like to,’ Sally agreed, ‘but it’s you I shall really be wanting to come down and see, George.’

  ‘Sally.’ His soft groan sent a thrill of emotion singing through her veins.

  A December dusk was darkening the streets when they left the Savoy. Sally didn’t resist or demur when George took advantage of the privacy of a shadowy doorway, taking her in his arms to kiss her.

  ‘I wish you didn’t have to go,’ Sally said, kissing him back. Right now she wanted to stay in his arms for ever, feeling the unsteady thump of his heart against her own and the warmth of his body, knowing that she was not alone after all.

  ‘I wish we could be together tonight,’ she whispered to him, ‘properly together, I mean, George.’

  His arms tightened round her.

  ‘Jane, the girl in the compartment with me when the train was bombed, said that she wished . . . well, she said she’d always behaved as a respectable girl is supposed to behave, but thinking that she was going to die made her wish . . . I don’t want to die not having known . . .’ Sally trailed off, absently sketching doodles into the thick fabric of George’s overcoat with her fingernail in her
self-consciousness.

  ‘You’ve gone very quiet,’ she said, after a pause.

  ‘I’m just thinking again how lucky I am. You’ve echoed my own thoughts so completely, Sally. You’ve said what is in my heart, but what I felt it wasn’t fair to you to say. One hears about chaps who put pressure on their girls by telling them that they’re going off to war and might not come back, and I don’t want you ever to feel that my love for you is like that, because it isn’t.’

  George kissed her forehead and then cupped her face in his hands. ‘My love for you is for all of you, for all our lives, for everything that we will share, but right now there’s nothing I want more than to love you in the most intimate and precious way there is, Sally, to make you mine, to celebrate what we have before life can snatch it away from us. War does that.’

  ‘Yes,’ Sally agreed. ‘It does.’

  They looked at one another, and then George exhaled unsteadily.

  ‘There’s never been a time in my life when I’ve felt happier – or more afraid because of that happiness,’ he confided. ‘As a man I should be standing here being big and strong and telling you that I’ll always be here to protect you and take care of you, but . . .’

  Sally reached out to him. ‘That kind of thing isn’t appropriate for us or our generation, George. Neither of us can make promises we both know this war may not allow us to keep. It’s enough for me – everything to me, in fact – that you love me and that I love you in return. We’re true partners in that love in a way that previous generations couldn’t be. Our generation are pioneers when it comes to making promises to one another, every bit as much as Mr McIndoe is a pioneer in his field of medicine. I love you, George, for everything that you are, and as you are.’

  Of course they had to seal the emotion of the words they’d just shared with another kiss, and then another, but finally it was time for them to part.

  ‘But not for long,’ George promised her. ‘It will be Christmas soon.’

  ‘But we’ll be lucky if we can get leave together.’