Far From Home

by Anne Bennett

  Kate knew she was probably right, but she didn’t really want to wear clothes described as serviceable on her wedding day. ‘Do I look all right?’

  ‘Oh, you look far better than just all right, girl,’ Alf said. ‘Our David is a lucky man and I hope he appreciates that.’

  ‘I agree with that,’ Susie said, and Sally nodded vigorously. ‘You look beautiful, Kate, you really do.’

  ‘There’ll be a rush of weddings soon, you wait and see,’ Alf said to her. ‘Just like it was in the last lot. Soon as war’s official, like, there’ll be loads of couples want to be married before they are parted.’

  ‘That’s why we did it in a rush,’ Kate said. ‘David said he’s not waiting to be called up. He wants to join the RAF. But do you think there is no way now of averting war?’

  ‘Can’t see how,’ Alf said. ‘We promised to go to Poland’s aid and Hitler’s armies are massing on the border. Only a matter of time, I think.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Dora said, ‘these aren’t the thoughts that you should be having on your wedding day.’

  Then suddenly Mary Mason was by her side, squeezing her arm, and Susie – knowing her mother maybe wanted a quiet word with Kate – moved away with Sally and Dora. Alf followed them. Kate was suddenly overcome with emotion for this lovely lady who had mothered her since she had arrived in Birmingham, and who she knew was disappointed at this slightly shoddy wedding, for she had seen that in her eyes. She knew she only wanted better for her because she cared about her, and Kate felt tears pricking her eyes as she hugged Mary tight, taking no heed of her protests that she would crush her clothes.

  Mary felt dampness on the shoulder of her outfit, though, and heard the slight sniffly noises Kate was making. ‘You’re not crying, are you?’ she demanded. ‘Oh, my dear girl,’ she exclaimed, dabbing at Kate’s face with a white lacy hanky. ‘That husband of yours will have my guts for garters if he thinks I’ve been upsetting you.’

  ‘You haven’t.’

  ‘Good, because you are very dear to us, you know,’ Mary said. ‘Oh, now don’t start again. You mustn’t cry at your own wedding. You let others do the crying for you on that day. Now, are you ready? Because they will all be waiting and you look so very beautiful. David will be bowled over by the sight of you.’

  Kate was glad to have had those few words with Mary, because when she went into the room where the wedding was to take place, she thought it a most depressing place. It was stark and bare, and chairs were arranged in rows in front of a table at the far end. David and Nick, his best man, were in the front row, and, hearing the door open, David turned. The breath stopped in his throat at Kate’s simple beauty as she stood framed in the doorway for a few minutes on the arm of Frank Mason.

  Kate’s eyes caught David’s and she was suddenly filled with love for the man waiting for her, so that she felt as though she might explode with happiness and the room no longer mattered. She concentrated her gaze on the man standing waiting for her, and found it was hard to walk respectably and sensibly at Frank’s side. When she reached David, their eyes seemed to fuse together; as their hands touched, she felt tingling all over her body. Suddenly the only important thing to her was that she was being married to this man that she loved so very, very much.

  And, after a few words, said and repeated in that bare room, David and Kate were man and wife, and David took Kate in his arms. ‘I love you, Mrs Burton,’ he said.

  Kate was unable to answer because David’s lips descended on hers and she gave herself up to the enjoyment of it. The small wedding party went off to a room in a pub nearest the register office and Kate was able at last to thank all those who had come. Sally had brought Ruby Reynard. ‘I love a good wedding,’ she told Kate, who noticed she had a handkerchief rolled up in her hand. Seeing Kate noticed this, she said, ‘I nearly always cry at weddings. Phil used to tease me about it. He said I wouldn’t feel I’d enjoyed myself if I hadn’t had a good old cry.’

  ‘And how did mine measure up, Ruby?’ Kate asked with a smile.

  ‘Oh, I shed tears at yours, my dear,’ Ruby admitted. ‘But you’ll be all right because you have a good man there.’

  ‘I know,’ Kate said.

  ‘David was saying that none of your people were able to make it,’ Dora said to Kate as she appeared by her side. ‘Terrible shame that.’

  ‘Yes,’ Kate said, ‘but it’s difficult to leave the farm in the summertime.’

  ‘Ah, yes, it must be,’ Dora said.

  But to Susie, Kate told the truth, and she stared at her as if she couldn’t comprehend it. ‘You never even told them you were getting married?’ she repeated incredulously.

  ‘What was the point?’ Kate said. ‘What I told Dora was partially true anyway, because this is a busy time on any farm.’

  The real reason, though, was because she couldn’t think of a way to tell her mother that she was being married in a register office, which to them would mean no marriage at all. But it was a marriage, she told herself, and the only one that she was ever going to have.

  Kate loved being married to David. They had had two days in Blackpool, where the sun shone down from a cornflower-blue sky. The first day they strolled along the sands, hand in hand, and paddled their feet at the water’s edge. Kate had never owned a bathing costume in her life, and anyway she thought she might feel embarrassed taking her clothes off. She didn’t mind slipping her shoes off, though, and paddling along feeling her toes curl over the small pebbles, or sink in the soft sand, David beside her doing the same with his trousers turned up to his knees.

  Sometimes they just sat and watched the world go by, the children making endless sandcastles and trying to fill the moat; they smiled at their consternation when their buckets of water seeped through the sand, or they watched them squealing with excitement as they rode the donkeys. ‘Isn’t this a grand place for children?’ Kate remarked.

  ‘Mmm,’ David said, lying back on the rug they had brought. ‘Someday we’ll bring our children here.’

  ‘You want children then?’

  David opened his eyes a crack and peered at Kate. ‘Course,’ he said. ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘These are the sort of questions that we should have asked before we decided to get married,’ Kate said.

  ‘You mean you don’t want children?’ David said incredulously.

  ‘I mean I’m joking,’ Kate said. ‘Don’t know that there is any way of stopping them anyway, if we continue to get up to the shenanigans that we got up to last night.’

  ‘Didn’t hear you complaining.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ Kate said. ‘And I’m not complaining now either, just making a comment.’

  ‘It’s just that there are ways of preventing pregnancy,’ David said.

  ‘Not for a Catholic,’ Kate said. ‘Birth control is forbidden.’

  ‘Thank God, I’m not a Catholic then,’ David said. ‘For much as I want children, I don’t want the body pulled out of you with a baby every year, and if I have to wear something then I will. But it’s too hot for discussions like this. Let’s go and find someone selling ice creams.’

  Kate followed behind David, but thoughts were tumbling in her head. David wasn’t a Catholic right enough, but she was, so was it still a sin for her to have sex, knowing that he was using something to prevent pregnancy? She wasn’t sure and couldn’t really ask. She would be embarrassed talking about sex with anyone, let alone a priest. She would just have to follow her conscience.

  ‘Penny for them,’ David said, jerking her back to the present. She turned and took the cornet that he offered her and then said with a coy smile, ‘My thoughts are worth more than a mere penny, I’ll have you know, David Burton.’

  But she didn’t offer to share them, because she decided that she wouldn’t waste a minute more on a problem that was hers alone, and when David said, ‘Shall we make for the fair?’ she nodded her head eagerly.

  Kate screamed her way round the Big Dipper, nearly had a heart attack in the
Ghost Train, was made deliciously dizzy on the Carousel and the Waltzers, bruised to bits on the Bumper Cars and laughed herself silly in the Hall of Mirrors. They had fish and chips with bread and butter and as much tea as they wanted in one of the cafés along the front and then ate candy floss on the way home to the boarding house. And all the way back it was as if bubbles of joy were inside Kate, for she had never felt such happiness before and her only wish was that the future that lay before them was not marred by the rumblings of war.

  ELEVEN

  By the time Kate and David came back from their honeymoon, preparations for war had gathered momentum, and when they went to Brookvale Park on their usual Sunday-afternoon jaunt, they found great ditches had been dug just along the park’s perimeter. Kate looked at them with distaste. ‘Why are we so concerned with Poland, with any of them?’ she asked. ‘I mean, this is all happening miles away. Why should it affect us?’

  ‘Because of the type of man Hitler is, I suppose,’ David said. ‘I don’t for one moment think that a man who has been amassing armaments and training servicemen for years will be satisfied with Poland. He will turn next to Belgium, Holland too maybe, and then France – and we are just a short Channel hop away from France. He has got to be stopped somewhere along the line. Surely you can see that?’

  Kate sighed. ‘I can, of course, but I don’t really want to see it,’ she said. ‘I want to stick my head in the sand and let life go on without me, and I will resurface again when life is very much more peaceful.’

  David laughed. ‘Can’t do that,’ he said. ‘It will be all hands to the pump when hostilities do start.’

  ‘And you still intend to enlist?’

  David nodded. ‘There is no way of getting out of it. It would only postpone the inevitable because I would be called up anyway. This way, I at least can go into the RAF as I want to.’

  ‘You will be in so much danger then,’ Kate said. ‘Every paper you open says that this war will be won in the air.’

  David nodded. ‘I think it will too,’ he said. ‘You only have to look at what German planes did to Guernica a couple of years ago to see just how powerful the Luftwaffe, his Air Force, are.’

  ‘And what he is capable of,’ Kate said, and she remembered the photographs in the papers, of the distressed people in shock and disbelief, looking at the mounds and mounds of rubble that was what their town had been reduced to, the streets littered with bodies. The thought of that happening in the streets of Birmingham, in any part of Great Britain, made her feel sick, and she looked at David and said, ‘You think they are going to bomb us like that?’

  ‘I certainly think they will try,’ David said. ‘And I imagine the RAF will do their damnedest to stop them, but in case any get through, I suppose they have got to try and protect the civilian population as much as they can.’

  It seemed that David was right, because the next day on her way to work, Kate passed a brick-built structure that she couldn’t remember seeing before. It was like no building she had ever seen because it had no windows at all – at least in what she could see of it, because it was almost completely lagged with sandbags. ‘What on earth is that?’ she asked Susie as she approached.

  ‘Surface-built shelter,’ Susie said. ‘The kids were filling up the sandbags all day yesterday.’ Kate studied them as she passed. They seemed solid enough and yet she wondered how well they would stand up to bombs hurtling through the air, and she gave a sudden shudder at the thought.

  Susie didn’t notice because she wanted to hear Kate’s news. ‘So how’s married life? It certainly seems to sit well on you.’

  ‘Married life is great, Susie,’ Kate said. ‘Why didn’t you and Nick make it a double wedding?’

  ‘Mom and Dad wouldn’t hear of it,’ Susie said. ‘I did mention it and I know they can’t actually stop me, but they can make life extremely difficult; you know how it is. I didn’t want to upset them. Anyway, while you were away they relented enough to let us get engaged.’

  ‘Have you a ring?’ Kate asked, because Susie’s left hand was unadorned.

  ‘Yeah,’ Susie said. ‘But not one I wear for work. We’ll pop round and see you later and you can have a proper butcher’s.’

  ‘I’d love that,’ said Kate, ‘but what about marriage though?’

  ‘They said no marriage till the end of hostilities,’ Susie said disgustedly. ‘God alone knows when that will be. Mom said she saw a lot of wartime romances that foundered in peacetime. Marry in haste and repent at leisure sort of thing.’

  ‘Heaven only knows what she thinks of me then.’

  ‘She loves you, Kate, you know that,’ Susie said. ‘And in a way she feels sorry for you.’

  ‘Sorry for me?’ Kate said, bristling. ‘There’s no need for anyone to be sorry for me.’

  ‘You couldn’t have been pleased with the wedding,’ Susie said. ‘My parents want me to have a proper wedding in church, even if I am marrying a Protestant.’

  ‘I doubt my parents would ever have been that welcoming to David wherever I married him,’ Kate said. ‘But you asked me if I was disappointed with my wedding, and I will just say this: I realized that how you get married doesn’t matter. It’s not the fancy clothes and food and razzmatazz, or even the white dress; it’s marrying the man you love in any way that suits you. If war is declared tomorrow, I will still be glad that I had this precious time with David.’

  A lump rose in Susie’s throat at Kate’s words and, after a moment, she said, ‘And I will regret not having that same special time with Nick. You’re right, Kate. No one should feel sorry for you.’

  There was an announcement on the wireless after the seven o’clock news, which they always turned on as they got ready for work, reminding them that the blackout was to come into force on 1 September.

  Kate’s eyes met David’s as she cried, ‘Oh God, with the wedding and honeymoon and everything, this sort of slipped my mind – or, if I’m honest, I didn’t want to remember it. How stupid is that, because if we haven’t got blackout curtains or shutters at the windows in four days’ time we will be fined two hundred pounds. I’d better go down the Bull Ring after work and see what I can pick up. Hope they still have stuff I can use. It will cost something to curtain this lot – and how on earth will I get it done in time?’

  ‘I can make shutters for some of the windows and that will save time and material,’ David said. ‘You get what you can and I will have a hunt round for the bits to make the shutters.’

  ‘Oh, David, thanks,’ Kate said. ‘That’s a real load off my mind.’

  She told Susie on the way to work, who was amazed she hadn’t even started on the blackout curtains. ‘Mom will help,’ she said. ‘I know she will, because she has done it for other people – she has that sewing machine Dad bought her at Christmas.’

  Kate knew all about Mary Burton’s sewing machine. She had turned out lots of things using it, starting with curtains and straight things, but going on to make dresses for herself and Susie.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Kate said. ‘I mean, it’s a bit of a cheek.’

  ‘Don’t see why when she’s done it for others,’ Susie said.

  ‘Are you sure she won’t mind?’ Kate asked anxiously.

  ‘Absolutely sure.’

  And that is what Kate told David when she arrived home later that night with a bale of black cloth. ‘Wasn’t that thoughtful of Susie. Her mother is very like that, you know: really helpful to everybody.’

  ‘The Masons are a nice family,’ David said. ‘Everyone says so. Anyway, I was having a look before you came in. I have got enough wood and fixings to do shutters for the kitchen windows and the bedroom, but there are two sizable windows in the living room and I think curtains would be better there.’

  And while Kate was helping David measure up the windows she suddenly said, ‘But it’s not just the curtains, is it? I mean, how are people to go about in the pitch-black?’

  David shrugged. ‘Search me,’ he said. ‘I thi
nk that we’re going to have to get used to things we never had to do before, because there was another announcement on the wireless before you got in tonight.’

  ‘Oh, what other delights are being planned for us?’

  ‘In a word, gas masks!’

  Kate turned an aghast face to David and repeated, ‘Gas masks?’

  ‘Yes, gas masks,’ David said. ‘Every man, woman and child has to have one and carry it with them at all times.’

  ‘Oh God,’ Kate said. ‘I don’t relish wearing one of those.’

  ‘Neither do I, to be honest, but it’s probably better than being gassed to death.’

  ‘Yeah, but just how likely is that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ David said, ‘and probably neither does anyone else, but the Germans used gas in the last war. I suppose they can’t take the risk. Anyway, the announcer said there will be various collection points organized, and you can pick your gas masks up from those from the first of September as well.’

  ‘That certainly seems to be a very important date in the calendar,’ Kate said, picking up the parcel and shoving the measurements into her pocket. ‘But just for now I’d best take these before it gets too late.’

  Mary Mason was only too pleased to help Kate, and said as they were only straight seams she could have them done for her the next day. ‘I’m ever so grateful, Mrs Mason.’

  ‘That’s all right, Kate,’ Mary said. ‘We all have to pull together, it seems to me, and between the two of us I really love using the machine. So if you call in tomorrow, I will have the curtains ready for you.’

  And she did, and Kate went home and hung them straight away. She felt depressed to see such hideous black curtains at the windows; the only consolation was that everybody else would be in the same boat.