by Annie Groves
‘Well,’ said Mrs Jackson, blowing out her cheeks and then pursing her lips, ‘that a son of mine would dare speak to me in such a manner, at this time of year as well! I cannot believe my only loving son would say such a thing. After all I’ve done for this family, you go and stick up for a girl who’s not fit to …’
‘Ma …’ Ted’s voice held a warning note. ‘I’ve already told you that I will not listen if you carry on talking about Agnes like that.’ He watched his mother give an innocent shrug.
‘Never a thought for my own deprivation,’ Mrs Jackson said, ignoring her son’s raised eyebrows. ‘I scrimp and save to give my offspring a loving, comfortable home and this is what I get!’ She was quiet for a moment knowing Ted’s flinty expression meant she had gone too far and she had to change her approach. ‘Well, son,’ she said with a sigh, ‘you know I only want the best for my family.’
‘Maybe so,’ Ted sighed, only too aware he was the one who did all the providing now, whilst his mother stayed at home and polished the heavy, faded furniture that hadn’t changed since she married his father. Hands in pockets, he moved from the window.
He was torn between his duty to his family and his great affection for Agnes. He didn’t like the way his mother carped on about her being a ‘foundling’, it wasn’t right, especially when Mum hadn’t had such a salubrious childhood either. But now they lived in the tiny two-roomed flat owned by the Guinness Trust, his mother thought she was on nodding terms with the king.
‘There isn’t room for the four of us to sit down together at the table all at the same time, never mind five!’ she exclaimed.
Ted wondered if his mother felt embarrassed about inviting Agnes to their small home and realised her haughty demeanour might just be a front. But the way she carried on sometimes, anyone would think she was brought up in the mews of Buckingham Palace instead of being part of one of the poor but decent families down by the East End docks.
Not that he had anything against such families, Ted silently reasoned, he thought they were the salt of the earth. But his mother soon forgot herself when she moved out of there. No, what he didn’t like was his mother’s hypocrisy, her total lack of tolerance for anything or anyone she considered wasn’t ‘respectable’ when his Agnes was the most decent person he knew.
‘Well, don’t think I’m going to fall over myself to be nice to her,’ Mrs Jackson continued, causing Ted to close his eyes and shake his head in exasperation. ‘She’s just out for what she can get from you, that’s what I think. I’ve met her kind before.’
‘But, Mum,’ Ted sighed, patiently now, ‘Agnes isn’t like other girls; she’s quiet and lovely.’
‘She can see you’ve got a good job and come from a nice home and she wants it.’ Mrs Jackson patted the turban covering her steel curlers, which she’d secreted from the salvage man. ‘You mark my words, once she’s got you she’ll bleed you dry, so think about that!’
It seemed to Ted that it didn’t matter how much he pleaded, she was determined to make life unbearable if Agnes came to tea.
His mother had her little routines, like putting the small presents she managed to get for his two sisters into their stockings and putting them on the sofa for Christmas morning, not trusting them to refrain from eating the contents if their stockings were left on the end of the bed. She also liked to have the vegetables peeled and put into pans of cold water in readiness, so they could all open their presents together. These were the rituals that made her life bearable, he supposed, but he hadn’t supposed that Agnes would not be part of them this year.
‘Would you rather I send someone around with a note and tell her not to come today?’ Ted asked, knowing that if Agnes did come to visit there would be a strained atmosphere – and quite rightly, Agnes would get upset, then the girls would get upset, and his mother in turn would get upset, suggesting it was all their visitor’s fault.
‘You do what you think’s best, son, it’s not for me to say.’ Mrs Jackson patted his arm and gave a tortured smile. ‘You know that as the man of the house you have the final say …’ Then, calling over her shoulder as she hurried to the front room she added more brightly, ‘I managed to get a lovely bit of liver from the butcher, would you like me to cook it with that nice gravy you like? And I’ve made your favourite steamed pudding with some currants I had left over from last week.’
‘Lovely, Mum,’ Ted said in a dull voice, his appetite suddenly disappearing.
‘Not every mother can say she’s got such a loving son who looks after his family like you do, Ted,’ Mrs Jackson said after he had summoned a lad from down the street and gave him a penny to take the note around to Article Row. ‘Your sainted father would be so proud of you.’
‘I’m sure.’ Sorely disappointed, Ted could have kicked himself for wanting a quiet life.
Yet, on reflection, what else could he do? A quiet life was his biggest wish, what with a war on and such a forceful mother. But he knew she was a woman who was not naturally strong and being left a widow had made her more dependent upon him than he would have liked. Also he knew that some would like to think she was made of the same stuff as the air-raid shelters, but he knew different; inside, his mother was as scared as everybody else.
Agnes read the note, brought by a boy of about twelve whose grey socks were concertinaed around skinny, grubby legs. The note told her Ted was very sorry but his mother was not feeling too well and was not up to having visitors today. Agnes felt deeply disappointed at being called a ‘visitor’; she’d thought she was much more than that to Ted’s family.
And she now knew she would not be able to share the good news of discovering her father with Ted; their working shifts had been incompatible over the last week and she had been waiting to speak to him all that time. Her eyes ran over the words again, aware that much as she had longed to tell him today, she could not burden Mrs Jackson with the added pressure of having ‘visitors’ when she clearly wouldn’t be feeling up to it.
‘Wait there,’ Agnes told the young lad who was waiting not only for any answer she might wish to return, but also, by the looks of his open hand, a tip. ‘I’ll just go and get a pen.’
Writing on the back of the note, to save paper, Agnes told Ted if there was anything she could do to be of help he only had to ask. Then she gave the young lad a threepenny bit, and he went happily on his way.
Olive could be heard humming a Christmas carol in the kitchen when Agnes came in from work, rubbing her hands together to get the feeling back as she went into the cosy, steamed-up room to find her landlady sitting on a chair, a hessian sack at the ready, plucking the large goose that had been hanging in the cold cellar since they came back from the farm. Tiny feathers were fluttering through the air like snow.
‘The butcher has prepared the bird, although he said he didn’t have time to remove the feathers,’ Olive said, causing Agnes to presume that this meant he had cut its head off and cleaned it out. ‘All I have to do is pluck it and cook it,’ Olive smiled, looking happier than Agnes had seen her for weeks. ‘I love Christmas Eve, don’t you, Agnes?’
Agnes nodded before telling Olive about the Christmas tree that she and three other underground workers had decorated for Chancery Lane station. ‘It must be ten feet tall,’ she said, ‘and it took ages to do, but it looked lovely when we’d finished.’
‘It’s a pity we haven’t got a tree this year, they are so scarce I couldn’t get hold of one before they’d sold out,’ Olive sighed. ‘Little Alice is just at that age where she would be thrilled to see the glass baubles.’ She was quiet for a moment. ‘Never mind,’ she said, brightening, ‘we could always put them on the tree beside the disused chicken coop.’ The chicks were still indoors so they didn’t die of cold. ‘That would really annoy Nancy,’ she laughed.
Agnes laughed too. ‘I heard her complaining that the back garden was looking more like a farmyard every day but she doesn’t have anything to carp about now.’
‘I’m not going to let Nanc
y ruin our Christmas,’ Olive said thoughtfully, ‘but one thing’s for sure, she won’t be too bothered about chickens being next door when the eggs started coming in about three months’ time.’
‘That soon?’ Agnes said with obvious delight.
‘Archie said they start laying at about six months so they are getting the best attention Barney can give them.’
‘Is Barney staying the night?’ Agnes asked, knowing that when Archie was on night shift the boy usually did so.
‘Yes, Archie is on duty,’ said Olive. ‘I was supposed to be going to the midnight service at Westminster Abbey with the other WVS but I said I would look after Barney for Sergeant Dawson. It will be nice to see his face in the morning when he wakes up and finds his presents.’ Barney had become something of a fixture in Olive’s house of late and he had settled into a nice routine with all of them. She reminded herself that she could always go to the midnight carol service another time.
‘I remember the lovely Thanksgiving service. It would have been lovely to have it in St Paul’s after it survived the Blitz but it was in Westminster Abbey for the American troops stationed here,’ she said, tugging at the remaining feathers of the huge goose, whilst Agnes cut the bread. ‘People were standing in the aisles and outside too.’
Even now the dramatic observance in the abbey, where English kings and queens had been crowned for centuries, brought a lump of pride to Olive’s throat. Although, she thought with a pang of remorse, hadn’t she a more heartbreaking reason to feel the force of tears behind her eyes when she attended the ceremony. She remembered Drew, Tilly’s sweetheart, and how he would have loved the splendour and the pageantry as more than three thousand American soldiers filled the abbey’s pews to sing ‘America, the Beautiful’ and ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. No doubt he would have been one of the reporters who commented that, for the first time in the church’s nine-hundred-year history, a foreign army was invited to take over the grounds.
Olive smiled now when she remembered one reporter who had said there was a ‘hedge of khaki’ around the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. However, her happy reverie was short-lived when she noticed that Agnes was looking a little distracted.
‘Is anything the matter, Agnes?’ she asked, concerned, as she finished plucking the bird.
‘It’s Ted’s mum, she’s not feeling too good.’
‘Oh, that’s a shame.’ Olive kept her true thoughts of Mrs Jackson’s curmudgeonly attitude to herself. ‘Will you be going around see Ted later?’
‘I won’t bother Mrs Jackson tonight,’ said Agnes. ‘She won’t want visitors if she’s not feeling too good.’
‘I expect you’re right, dear,’ Olive answered, tying string around the neck of the hessian sack to stop the feathers escaping. Then, offering little Alice a sliver of carrot to chew whilst waiting for her tea, she silently calculated how many more potatoes she would need to peel, knowing there was enough rabbit pie and vegetables to go around all of them, although she had to convince Alice to eat the carrots, which the child really didn’t like much.
‘You don’t see rabbits wearing glasses, do you, Alice?’ Olive said cheerfully. Alice shook her head. ‘That’s because they eat all their carrots.’ She watched with joy as the little girl began to nibble on the carrot with greater enthusiasm.
‘I haven’t got any icing for the Christmas cake this year,’ she said, smiling at the child, ‘although I bought one of those plaster covers to go over the one I made, so that will make the table look nice tomorrow.’ Olive sighed; rationing had intensified to such an extent that she even had to give up her egg ration to buy corn for the chickens that hadn’t even started to lay eggs yet.
Yet she wouldn’t grumble, there were others much worse off, she reasoned. Along with everybody else, she knew that this Christmas would be a lean one with everything in short supply; there was nothing that hadn’t been affected in the year. But she had been shrewd in her judgement and had been stockpiling what supplies she could for Christmas.
‘Shall I set the table?’ Agnes asked, automatically taking the cutlery from the drawer.
Olive was momentarily distracted by a knock on the back door and, putting the huge bird on the table, she went to answer it, reminding herself that it must be locked immediately; she didn’t want any of those looters Archie had been telling her about coming into her kitchen and stealing such a precious bird.
‘A real goose!’ Nancy’s covetous eyes slowly examined the huge bird whilst Olive fixed the blackout blind and switched the light back on. ‘Well, well, well, aren’t you the lucky ones. Black market, I suspect?’ she went on as her beady eyes missed nothing in the kitchen. Her rigid voice belied her forced smile as she thought of the mock goose sitting on her own table, which consisted of potatoes, a couple of cooking apples, some cheese from her ration, and a little dried sage for taste, all bound together with vegetable stock and a tablespoon of flour. Not a sniff of meat in it!
‘Black market?’ Olive’s eyes widened and, quelling the rising indignation, she said in a low voice, ‘It is no such thing – it was a gift!’
‘A gift?’ Nancy said, lifting an eyebrow. ‘My, oh my, you do know some generous people, Olive, I must say.’
Olive refrained from rising to Nancy’s bait. It would be so easy to gloat and enjoy her moment of triumph knowing that her neighbour would have crowed from dawn till dusk had she been in possession of such a magnificent bird for Christmas. But it was the time of goodwill to all men and even to Nancy, she told herself.
‘It’s been so long since we had a decent bit of meat,’ Olive said almost apologetically, observing the utter misery in her neighbour’s eyes. Reluctantly she realised that her thoughts were less than charitable, and that she wouldn’t be able to enjoy the bird if she didn’t at least make the offer.
‘There is plenty, if you and Mr Black would care to join us, just don’t forget to bring your rations and we can pool our resources and all enjoy Christmas together …’
‘Why certainly, of course we would love to come for dinner!’ Nancy answered before the invitation had hardly left Olive’s lips. Agnes, standing behind Nancy, grimaced causing Olive to give a sickly smile and a little shrug.
‘Let’s say lunch will be at …’
‘Oh, we can be here early as you like, right after church I should think, it’ll save me lighting the fire and I can save the coal.’
‘Well, Agnes has to work at the station until four as the trains are running until then,’ Olive said in a half-hearted attempt to dissuade their neighbour from arriving too early, ‘so lunch will be a little later than most people would be expecting on Christmas Day.’
‘Oh, that won’t bother me and Mr Black,’ said Nancy, ignoring the hint. ‘We’re not fussy.’
‘I’m going to wrap my Christmas presents later,’ Olive said to Agnes, squashing her unseasonal thoughts about Nancy as her neighbour let herself out of the front door to go and give her husband the good news. ‘I know it’s not very patriotic of me; I should have put the paper into the collections, but I saved it from last year’s presents and I found a lovely bit of red silk ribbon in the clothing exchange to tie them.’ She had washed, pressed and cut the ribbon lengthways so there was twice as much to use. Giving baby Alice a little hug she said to the child, ‘And later, you can have nice red ribbon for your hair to make you even more beautiful.’
‘Oh, you will look lovely, Alice!’ Agnes exclaimed, then turning to Olive she said, ‘I love Christmas, especially now, with you and Alice.’
‘So what is worrying you? Come on, I know you have something on your mind,’ Olive said.
‘I’ve been so nervous about meeting my father,’ Agnes answered, pulling at the skin on the back of her hand, a sure sign she was upset, ‘that I hadn’t given Christmas as much thought as I should have, and I haven’t done anywhere near the amount of shopping I ought and I forgot to buy Ted’s mum a present.’
‘Oh, is that all,’ Olive laughed, relieved. ‘Well, as
far as we are concerned, I think you’ve already given us our present this year.’ She nodded towards the huge bird now sitting in the white earthenware sink, as it was too big to fit on the pantry shelf or on the wooden draining board. ‘I did manage to save a nicely decorated flour bag, if you want to use that to make a gift for her.’
‘But all the shops are shut now, and what can I make with a flour bag?’ Agnes asked, her brows creasing.
‘I’ve saved the goose feathers, you can make her a cushion.’
‘That’s lovely, Olive,’ Agnes said, her face wreathed in smiles as she prepared little Alice for bed. ‘You have some great ideas to make our lives easier.’
‘It comes with practice,’ Olive laughed, knowing the goose was going in the oven first thing tomorrow morning, and judging by the size of it, she guessed it would take about five hours to cook. The good thing was that it would be ready in time for Agnes arriving home from work – just as it should be.
‘But are you sure you want to give up those precious goose feathers?’
‘It was your father who supplied the goose, Agnes, it’s only fair that you should have the feathers – and I’ll cook the potatoes in the fat and serve it with apple sauce.’
‘Oh, Olive, don’t,’ Agnes laughed. ‘I won’t be able to sleep for thinking about it. And thanks for the feathers, that will make a lovely present for Ted’s mum.’ There was a knock at the front door as Agnes carried Alice through to the front room to lie on the sofa;
‘Tilly!’ Agnes’s cry brought Olive running into the hall whilst still wiping her hands on her apron, before throwing her arms around her daughter. Barney had told her that Tilly was coming home though she wasn’t sure what time, but that didn’t matter now as long as they were all together for Christmas. Olive gave a satisfied sigh as the house came alive to the sound of laughing and questions being asked all at the same time.
