by Lizzie Page
When I Was Yours
Absolutely heartbreaking world war 2 historical fiction
Lizzie Page
Books by Lizzie Page
The War Nurses
Daughters of War
When I Was Yours
Available in audio
The War Nurses (UK listeners | US listeners)
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Epilogue
Daughters of War
Hear More from Lizzie Page
Books by Lizzie Page
A Letter from Lizzie
Author Note
The War Nurses
Acknowledgements
To my lovely dad, Len Lierens
Who was evacuated from Stepney, London to Hinckley, Leicester.
Keep the home fires burning
While your hearts are yearning
Though your lads are far away
They dream of home
Lyrics by Mrs Lena Guilbert Brown Ford; Music by Ivor Novello
1
1939 – Now
In August, two women wearing hats and holding clipboards come to do the room count. They are in the house for all of one minute. They trot straight upstairs and push open the doors, then, before I’ve had time to put on my lipstick, they are back down again. All that morning’s cleaning, baking and wiping was in vain. They thank me kindly for my time and I am still thanking them kindly for their efforts when they are gone.
I can’t leave it like this.
I swing open the front door and follow them down the path. Never mind my tartan carpet slippers; if I don’t speak out, Edmund will give me what-for.
‘Excuse me, I say – excuse me!’
They turn wordlessly.
‘Our spare rooms are not actually spare rooms,’ I explain.
The smaller woman raises her eyebrow at me but it does not feel like an invitation to continue.
I continue anyway. I am in for a penny, in for a pound.
‘My husband needs one. It is for visiting family members.’
Taller woman looks at me disapprovingly. ‘That still leaves one.’
‘Dressing room?’ I say and as the words come out my mouth I know how stupid they sound. Not just stupid – these days, such words could even be treasonous.
She tilts her clipboard at me to have a look. ‘We’ve put you down for one,’ she says, pointing at our names: Mr and Mrs E Lowe. Three Bedrooms. ‘Just the one. You’ll manage.’
The smaller woman leans towards me. ‘It might not amount to anything.’
But I know it will come to something. I know it will because it did last time when no one else thought it would. It’s all very well saying ‘It never came to anything in 1933, or in 1937’ but it did in 1914, a fact people conveniently like to gloss over.
Still, I stand there hesitant on the garden path. The women carefully open and shut the gate – no one could say they are not thorough – and I open and shut my mouth like a goldfish in a (one-bedroom) bowl. They trot off to number six, where Mrs Dean appears to welcome them in warmly.
Mrs Burton comes out of number two, next door – they were at hers just before mine. I note she is holding a dishcloth and a mug in her hands and one fat, pink curler dangles precariously over her forehead. Who am I to judge? Standing in my slippers for all the world to see?
Mrs Burton and I have been neighbours for eighteen years but I can count the conversations we’ve had on one hand: gutters; trees; Christmas greetings. And the two times her dogs got out. Edmund hasn’t encouraged friendships. He doesn’t like people knowing our business (even though as far as I know we have no business).
She sees me and nods. She is a mild-mannered, gentle woman. I imagine she is about my age, but she looks older in that way that women with children often do.
‘Didn’t take too long, did it?’
‘No…’
‘Wish we had the room,’ she says pleasantly.
‘Oh yes.’
‘Be nice to do our bit.’
‘Do our bit, absolutely.’ I hesitate. ‘It probably won’t amount to anything though, will it?’
Mrs Burton’s house is also a three-bed but she has two nearly grown daughters. One girl is bold, leans out of the window and waves at people in the street and the other always has her head in a book. Mrs Burton has been put down for zero. She laughs, but wistfully. Says she would have liked to have nine or ten come to her. ‘You just want to do something, don’t you? Help the children escape the bombs.’
I do, I do, but there are so many things stopping me. I don’t.
Mrs Burton is about to go back into number two when she reconsiders. ‘Why don’t you come over for a pot of tea, Mrs Lowe? You look like you could do with a brew.’
* * *
Mrs Burton’s house is identically laid out to ours, but its decor and its furnishings are much shabbier. The kitchen wallpaper is peeling in parts. The ceiling shows signs of a leak. The cream surfaces are now brown. I decide that there is more love here. Less love for accrued items means more love for the people. I don’t know if that’s true, but it feels true.
My house is very tidy.
Mrs Burton is worried that her dogs will worry me. They are two large hairy dogs and I don’t say it, but these are particularly unattractive specimens. It seems odd to me that out of all the dogs in the world, she has chosen these. I tell her they are fine, and when they jump up and paw my skirt, I pretend it’s charming. They turn their attention to my slippers and I try to nudge them off. The dogs, that is, even though I am appalled at my slippers too.
The visiting billeting women have thrown me. I want it known that I am not the kind of lady who would usually venture outside in her slippers. The dog mounts the armchair and proceeds to manoeuvre its hind parts up and down over the cushion there.
I blush. I am not used to dogs and I don’t know if this display has been put on for me alone, or if everyone who enters the house is the recipient of such a show. Maybe the dog is trying to tell me something?
Mrs Burton asks if I’ve been allocated an evacuee and I reply wearily, ‘One, just one, but my husband…’ and I am thinking, Can this really be happening? Since when was one just one?
Mrs Burton finally drags t
he dogs outside and asks if I’ve got anything for him or her, and I stare at her mystified.
‘I mean for the evacuee?’
Still nothing. Edmund says I can be very slow sometimes.
‘Toys?’
Toys! Of course. I didn’t think of that. ‘No, nothing.’ Pity the poor child coming to my house. Not a rocking horse. Not even a teddy. I have such a lot to learn. I can’t help feeling excited, but then quickly tell myself, It’s not going to work, don’t get your hopes up.
‘I might be able to help you there,’ says Mrs Burton, and even as I am saying, ‘No, no, Mrs Burton, please,’ she has rushed upstairs, leaving me alone in the kitchen at the table with the ticking clock. It is five minutes fast. Or am I five minutes slow? I wish I weren’t so awkward. Mrs Burton has lace doilies of the type my sister used to hate. I look at my nails. My nails at least are clean. There is a newspaper on the other side of the room but I can’t get over to it and it’s not one of the terribly informative ones anyway.
Finally, Mrs Burton staggers down the stairs behind a full cardboard box. With an ‘oof’ she places it down between us, pulls things out one by one. Pens, books, crayons, marbles, football, stamp-collecting album and, just in case, a skipping rope – ‘Only let ’em do it in the garden, mind. I lost three of my favourite ornaments with that – boy on the piano, girl with the violin and the goatherd.’
I don’t know if I’m expected to select one thing, or the whole lot, but then she shoves it across to me. ‘It’s all yours, Mrs Lowe.’
‘I don’t think it’s likely—’
‘It’ll make the little one feel at home, won’t it?’
Oh dear Lord, is this really happening? So much for it not amounting to anything.
Mrs Burton tips sugar into my tea. She is so eager to make life sweeter. She is sunshine, and I am rain.
I fumble in my pocket, wondering if I should make a payment. Mrs Burton laughs incredulously. ‘You’d do the same if it were the other way round, wouldn’t you?’
* * *
‘Absolutely no way are we having an evacuee here,’ Edmund says over the chicken and leek pie with mash. Admittedly, the gravy is not my best work – I’m not getting the consistency right recently. I’ll add it to the long list of inadequacies that dogs me. The carrots are also perilously overcooked, but Edmund prefers them like that. Even his own crunching annoys him.
‘It might not come to anything,’ I say. ‘I don’t think there’ll be another war, do you?’ I add nervously. ‘No one is that stupid.’
Everyone is that stupid.
‘I’ll not have screaming kids running around here.’
‘Why would they be screaming?’ I always try to remain civil over dinner with Edmund. It’s twelve minutes out of my day, that’s all.
I imagine numbers one, two, three, five and six – our neighbours, normal-appearing people – excitedly getting everything spick and span for London children who need to escape the bombs. I imagine they all have their husbands’ blessings.
I continue cutting my pie. The knife squeaks for mercy against the plate. Edmund winces.
‘Don’t want filthy city kids smearing their fingers over our walls.’
‘Why would they do that?’
‘There are plenty of families who can take them.’
A pause.
‘Edmund, we’re a family who can take them.’
‘I meant the ones who have children, they know children. They’ll be better at looking after feral city kids than us.’
Than me, Edmund means. He thinks I can’t look after a child. The second he rests his knife and fork on the plate, I whip it away, scrape the remains in the bin, take the plate to the sink and scrub it clean. He is still sitting there, staring into the distance. Together time is over.
* * *
Three weeks later, German armies are amassing by the Polish borders and Hitler has gone and signed a peace treaty with the Russians, which is not what we want at all. Britain is in uproar. Not again. The Nazis have got to be stopped – but really, does it have to be us who do the stopping?
I read the government leaflets on how to protect ourselves from bombs. I buy and hang material for the blackout – every window must be covered, not a chink of light may give us away. The streetlights don’t come on any more and Edmund has even unscrewed the lamp from his bike. There’s talk that rationing will be brought in sooner rather than later because everyone agrees that last time it came in too late. ‘Lessons have been learned from the Great War,’ pronounces the minister ominously on the wireless.
Not that many lessons, I think.
When the postman brings the anticipated letter, I leave it for a bit and in my head, it ticks like a bomb on the kitchen table.
Edmund goes to the living room to tune in to the next instalment of bad news. They tell us what we have already guessed: Operation Pied Piper – the mass evacuation of children from London – is going ahead.
I clean the already-clean kitchen, avoiding the letter. Eventually, I open it, read it. So, it’s true. We have been allocated one, just the one. I am to go to the village hall tomorrow and collect him or her. The hall is only five minutes’ walk away, so I can’t complain about that. Everything is only five minutes away in Hinckley.
I bake an apple pie because this is a national emergency. And what could be more welcoming to a little traveller than a slice of pie? We are more than halfway to war – there’s no going back now – and children will be delivered from London. I think it’s a bit like the stories we were told when we were little: about the stork that brought the baby, only I used to think it was ‘stalk’ and the baby grew from a root and then was plucked from a branch.
While the pie is in the oven, I go up to look at the spare room, the one I’d told the billeting officers that family use when they come to stay. The only one who ever used to come was my sister, Olive, and the last time she came to stay was over fifteen years ago.
The walls of our house are bare. I sometimes remember the chaotic beauty of Olive’s friend Mrs Ford’s house in Warrington Crescent: there was barely a space not covered by art – not just the walls, but the chests of drawers, the tables, the display cabinets, every surface was hidden with a carefully selected lamp, statue or ornament from Christie’s. Mrs Ford was known for her excellent and transatlantic tastes. When we first moved here, I planned to put up pictures everywhere but Edmund said he didn’t want to spoil the plaster.
The spare room is the only room where the walls are spoiled. On the wall behind the headboard is a picture that Olive drew. It lives inside an elaborate golden frame that doesn’t really do justice to the simplicity of the pencil-drawn portrait inside. It was one of her many sketches of me. She had done a series to support her application to study art at Goldsmiths College, which was accepted. In the picture, I’m looking out of the drawing-room window of our old family home. I find the way she captured my face both familiar and unfamiliar: all my features are there, all rendered in their correct proportions, but they are arranged in an expression of optimism or perhaps enthusiasm. Not my habitual look. I was nineteen when she drew it. She was seventeen and a half. That half was always very important to Olive.
This picture wouldn’t be strange for a young child to have in their room, would it? Should I get something else? What do children like to look at? Pretty cottages? Ponies?
I take the pie out of the oven and let it cool on the side. Then I go to bed. Edmund is outside, in his shed or somewhere else. I don’t know where he goes.
I can’t sleep.
A child.
One child, just one, may be coming to live with us!
2
1914 – Then
Everything was shaky, everything was blurred. It was our generation’s chance to prove ourselves. This was it! Excitement was overflowing like an unwatched pan. I was nineteen, Olive had just turned eighteen. Richard and Edmund were both nineteen. Christopher was twenty. We thought we knew everything.
Smac
k bang in the middle of the street, stopping all the traffic, the newspaper boy had jumped onto a stool and was shouting aloud from the paper. At each point he made, the crowd cheered and he extravagantly threw his black cap up in the air and then deftly caught it on the down. I found myself quite mesmerised.
‘Britain Prepared for War!’
‘Hoorah!’
‘Shipbuilding Yards Working at Full Pressure!’
‘Hoorah!’
‘Asquith Still War Minister!’
‘Hoorah!’
The war woke us up. It was as though we had been sleepwalking until then. Suddenly we were full of adrenalin, full of whizz, bang, fizz, crammed with possibilities. They called it ‘war spirit’ and it was everywhere, contagious as measles.
The Saturday after war had been declared, Father, Olive and I were invited to Aunt Cecily and Uncle Toby’s for a special luncheon party. I don’t think it was a celebration, but it came pretty near. Edmund, his brother Christopher and their parents were coming to join us after lunch. Their family and my aunt and uncle were exceedingly close and there was rarely a family do without them making an appearance.
