Читать книгу Goodnight Sweetheart - Annie Groves, Annie Groves - Страница 12
ОглавлениеProudly Molly smoothed down the grey-green tweed skirt of her WVS uniform suit. Under the jacket she was wearing the red jumper that was part of her uniform, like the felt hat that she had pulled firmly over her curls. For winter there was a dark green coat to wear over the suit.
When Mrs Wesley had handed Molly the voucher to enable her to buy the uniform, she had praised her for passing her first-aid test, and had told her warmly to wear her uniform with pride. Although the suit was more functional than glamorous, Molly had managed discreetly to alter the fit of the skirt so that it looked more shapely. She had collected it earlier in the week and she was very conscious of wearing it, and also that she was about to play her part in a very important event. Today was the day when the children of the cul-de-sac and the surrounding area were to be evacuated from Liverpool to the safety of the Welsh countryside.
As she walked past the allotments she stopped to speak to Bert Johnson, who, despite the fact that he was coming up for eighty, still worked on his allotment. Rover, his mongrel dog, was lying faithfully at his side, and Molly stooped to pat the dog’s head.
‘Tell yer dad that he wants to get a rooster for them chickens of his,’ he told Molly.
Her father often went round to check up on Bert, who lived several doors down from them on the opposite side of the road. Although he was older than their father, he too had served in the Great War and the two men got on well together. He had survived the war without any injury, but Bert had lost both his wife and his two young children in the influenza outbreak that had followed, and now lived alone apart from his loyal dog.
Promising him that she would pass on his message, Molly hurried down the road. She and the other WVS involved had been told to be at their designated schools well before the children to be evacuated were due to arrive. Molly’s job was to tick off their names on a list she was going to be given and then later to help escort the children to Lime Street station to board the trains that would take them to their designated evacuation areas.
To her relief, the first person she saw when she reached the school was Anne, who beamed at her.
‘I’ve been looking out for you. We’re going to be working together. What luck!’
Two hours later, armed with her list, Molly was busily asking children’s names as they arrived at the school, whilst at the same time trying to reassure desperately worried mothers that they were doing the right thing. Already the school seemed to be full of children carrying suitcases tied with string, the older children with pillowcases containing the rest of their belongings slung over their shoulders. Many were also holding on to younger siblings, the gas masks they had been issued with hanging round their necks.
The boys, as boys will, were scuffling lightheart-edly with one another, whilst the girls looked on disapprovingly. Molly knew that behind the teasing and jostling lurked real fear at what lay ahead.
‘If you can, then do try to persuade the mothers to say their goodbyes to the kiddies here instead of going with them to Lime Street,’ Molly’s superior had told her, but it wasn’t as easy as that. Molly found it heartbreaking to see the brown labels tied onto the children’s clothes and belongings, their names often written in shaky handwriting, bearing silent witness to the mothers’ anguish at the thought of the coming parting. The children were clinging resolutely to their gas masks, as they had been told to do.
‘You’ll look after them, won’t you?’ more than one mother had begged Molly with tears in her eyes, although there were some desperately sad little ones lined up, who seemed to have no one to care for them at all. Although she knew that she was not supposed to do so, Molly discreetly gave just that little bit more attention to these children, some of whom were very shabbily dressed and didn’t seem to have with them the new clothes and personal items the Government had instructed that each child was to have.
‘A toothbrush each, if you please, and how am I supposed to give my three that, when they all share the same one at ’ome?’ Molly heard one mother demanding indignantly of one of the other WVS girls.
By and large, though, the children she was dealing with were well fed and properly clothed. It tore at Molly’s sensitive heart, though, to see their wan little faces and anxious expressions when they thought that none of the grown-ups was watching them. How would she have felt if this had been her and June? She would have been crying and looking every bit as upset as the little girl she had just tried to comfort. But it was all being done for the children’s own good – to keep them safe if the cities were bombed.
Molly tried to remind herself that she was here to do a job and that she must not let herself give in to her emotions. It wasn’t easy, though, especially when one poor mother handed over her little girl wearing a heavy metal calliper on a badly twisted leg, and begged Molly, ‘She has to have her leg rubbed every night with warm olive oil. I’ve written it down on her label, look. You’ll mek sure that whoever she goes to knows that, won’t you, miss?’
‘I’ll do my best,’ Molly promised her gently.
Every child had been given a block of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk and a bottle of Edmondson’s lemonade for the journey, but some of the children hadn’t been able to wait and had already consumed the whole lot.
She had lost count already of the number of times a small hand had tugged urgently on her skirt and a small voice had piped up shrilly, ‘Please, miss, I want the lav,’ or, ‘Please, miss, me bruvver’s peed his pants,’ or, ‘Please, miss, our kid’s bin sick.’ It made Molly think again of her mother – all the tiny, thankless tasks she’d done for her and June, and how they had fallen to her father after her death.
She had been thinking of her mother such a lot since they had found her wedding dress. How would she have felt if she were alive? She would have been worrying about the war like they all were. Would she have been proud of Molly for joining the WVS; might she have even joined with her and persuaded June to do the same? Molly sensed that their mother’s presence in their lives would have had a softening effect on June’s sometimes determined nature. She would certainly have shared in June’s pride that Frank was doing his duty. Their mother would have liked Frank – Molly knew that instinctively. But what would she have thought of Johnny? Would she have understood how confused Molly felt, or would she have taken June’s side and told Molly that she was being silly? Molly liked to think that she would have understood.
The day seemed to be passing in an unending toing and froing, but eventually the supervisors came round to collect the lists and to announce that they would shortly be leaving for Lime Street.
‘There seem to be a lot of gaps on my list,’ Molly apologised.
‘I’m afraid that rather a lot of the mothers have changed their minds at the last minute,’ the supervisor told her, as the children were marshalled into a crocodile, ready, along with their teachers and helpers like Molly, to walk to Lime Street station to wait there for the train that would take them to North Wales.
Molly was just about to leave the school when she caught sight of Sally Walker. She looked pale and unwell, one hand pressed into her lower back as though to ease away an ache.
Hurrying over to her, she exclaimed, ‘Sally, aren’t you coming?’
Women who were pregnant, or who had babies and very young children, had been offered the opportunity to be evacuated. The more well-to-do could afford to rent houses for themselves, but for most people evacuation meant having to live under someone else’s roof, and very few women were keen to do that, especially when it meant moving away from their own homes and their families.
Sally shook her head. ‘No. I want to stay here just in case my Ronnie gets leave unexpected, like. Besides, I don’t fancy having to live alongside strangers, and having to ask every time I wanted to mek meself a brew and all that. I like ’aving me own home and me own things around me.’ Her eyes were swollen and she had obviously been crying. ‘I came down with me neighbour. She’s sending her kiddies off. Bloody awful it is, an’ all, poor little mites.’
‘It’s the best thing for them, Sally,’ Molly tried to comfort her.
‘What would you know?’ Sally demanded sharply. ‘You haven’t got any kiddies.’ She winced as she spoke and Molly asked her worriedly if she was all right.
‘Stop goin’ on, will yer, Molly, and leave us alone,’ Sally snapped.
The walk down to Lime Street seemed to take for ever, and some of the younger children had already started to flag. In an attempt to cheer them up and spur them on, their teacher started to sing loudly ‘Sing As We Go’, urging the children to join in. One little girl, too exhausted to walk any further, suddenly dropped down on her bottom, sobbing. Molly bent down and picked her up. She was wet through and crying, and Molly comforted her as best she could, wondering how she would be feeling if she did have children.
Had it really only been a week ago that she had been dancing and laughing at Grafton Dance Hall? Now, watching Liverpool’s children wrenched away from their homes and their mothers, she couldn’t believe she would ever laugh again.
‘Miss, will they have pictures where we’re going?’ one little boy asked her. ‘Only I ain’t going if’n I can’t see Flash Gordon of a Saturday no more.’
‘I’m sure there will be a cinema,’ Molly reassured him, treating his concern seriously. ‘And there’ll be lots of places for you to play as well, nice green fields, and fresh air.’
‘Fields?’ one sharp-faced boy asked her warily. ‘What’s them, then?’
These were city children – some of them slum children, Molly reminded herself as she struggled to find the right words to calm their fears.
‘Fields are where farmers grow things for us to eat,’ she told them. ‘I dare say that those of you who get billeted with farmers will be able to collect your own eggs from the farmer’s wife’s hens. My auntie has a farm and she used to let me do that when I was your age.’
‘Will there be ponies for us to ride?’ one little girl asked eagerly.
‘Maybe …’ Molly answered her cautiously, adding firmly, ‘I expect you’ll all make lots of new friends at your new schools.’
Although some of the children accepted her words happily, she could see that others were not so easily convinced or appeased, and she could hardly blame them.
Once they reached Lime Street station, the combined noise of so many people packed into one place was such that Molly was tempted to put her hands over her ears. She had never seen so many children. They were everywhere – crying, sobbing, shouting, throwing tantrums, or else completely silent, as if they had been struck dumb by the trauma they were enduring, whilst mothers wept, and harassed officials did their best to make some sort of order out of the chaos. The trains that were to take the children away stood silently beside the platforms, their doors firmly closed. No one would be allowed to board until they were queuing up in the right order, their names ticked off the appropriate list. So much careful planning had gone into this operation to protect the country’s young, but right now all Molly could think of was its emotional cost to the families involved.
A small boy tugged on her sleeve, and demanded, ‘Did all these kids get a bar o’ chocolate, miss?’
‘I expect so,’ she murmured. She knew that from now on the smell of Dairy Milk was always going to remind her of this heart-rending scene.
Behind the barriers, mothers were standing ten deep, calling out their children’s names, and as Molly watched, one young woman reached over and grabbed her child, refusing to give her back.
‘This is so awful,’ Molly whispered to Anne, who had just materialised at her side.
‘It’s for their own good, Molly. We must remember that, and think of how much safer they are going to be instead of thinking of this.’
Mutely, Molly nodded. She was still holding the little girl she had picked up in the street. The child had stopped crying now and, instead, had fallen asleep. She couldn’t be more than five, Molly guessed.
‘She’s wet herself,’ she told Anne unhappily. ‘I was wondering if I could take her somewhere to change her. I hate to think of her sitting on the train and being uncomfortable.’
Anne sighed. ‘There’s some done worse than that to themselves,’ she told Molly forthrightly. ‘I know the Government meant well, giving them that chocolate, but I can’t help thinking it might not have been a good idea.’
Molly grimaced as the loudspeakers suddenly boomed out teachers’ names and classes.
‘Here we go,’ Anne told her as the children surged forward towards the waiting LNWR train.
‘I just keep thinking about those children and their poor mothers,’ Molly said back home, pushing her dinner around her plate without eating it.
She had told June all about her day when she had got home. June, despite her cynicism at Molly volunteering, had actually been interested and touched by the children’s plight.
‘Like I’m allus saying, you’re a right softie, our Molly.’
‘Sally Walker was there at the school. She’s refused to be evacuated in case her Ronnie comes home on leave,’ Molly told her.
‘I wish my Frank blinkin’ well would. Every letter I get says the same thing – he doesn’t know yet!’
‘Now that I’ve tacked your wedding dress, I need you to try it on before I start machining it,’ Molly reminded her. ‘We don’t want Frank coming home and it not being ready,’ she added, trying to cheer June up a little bit, as well as shake off the feelings of misery the evacuation of the children had left her with.
‘If he does come home,’ June stressed sombrely.
‘Oh, June, you mustn’t say that,’ Molly protested. ‘Of course he will. You know what Ronnie Walker said. He said that the trainees were bound to be given leave before they go on active duty.’
‘I know what he said all right, but Ronnie Walker isn’t the blinkin’ Prime Minister, is he?’
Molly could see how upset and unhappy her sister looked and wished she could offer her some proper reassurance.
‘Let’s have the wireless on, eh, Dad?’ June suggested to her father, who had just come into the room. ‘A bit of Tommy Trinder will give us a laugh.’
Molly looked in the mirror and straightened her hat, pressing her lips together to set the lipstick she had just carefully applied. She was wearing her navy-blue ‘going to church’ suit, bought from Lewis’s sale in the spring. Her hat was last year’s but she had retrimmed it to match her suit, and her polka-dot blouse she had made herself.
June was also wearing a navy-blue suit in a similar style – they had bought them together, agreeing that they were a sensible buy – but her blouse had a floral pattern and a different collar, and she had bought herself a new hat.
On Sundays they used the front door, and their father beamed proudly as he walked up the cul-de-sac with a daughter on either arm.
‘How’s them chicks of yours?’ one of their neighbours, Gordon Sinclair, called out to him, crossing the road with his wife to walk along with them, shaking his head and telling Albert, ‘It would have saved youse a lorra messin’ if’n you’d got point-of-lay pullets.’
‘Chicks is best,’ the girls’ father insisted, the two men arguing good-naturedly as the small group made its way to the church.
‘By, but it’s quiet without the kiddies,’ Gordon’s wife, Nellie, commented, adding, ‘You was at the school helping, wasn’t you, Molly? I heard as how Sally Walker didn’t go. Mind you, I don’t blame her, what with her due any week now. Oh Gawd,’ Nellie continued without pausing to take a breath, ‘there’s Alf Davies. Up and down the cul-de-sac all the time, he is, sticking his nose into other people’s business.’
The Sinclairs were Scottish Liverpudlians and had family connections down in the tenements by the docks. It was no secret that Gordon was the person to ask if you wanted to get hold of something, no questions asked. Some inhabitants of the cul-de-sac looked down on the Sinclairs and considered them to be rough, but for all her outspokenness Molly knew that Nellie Sinclair had a kind heart, and she knew too that, despite conceiving several children, Nellie had miscarried them all and lamented the fact that they had no family. Every child in the street knew that if you went round to number 39, like as not Nellie’s face would crease into a smile and she would reach into the special jar she kept in her kitchen and give you a bit of Spanish or a humbug.
‘Oh dear, I thought we was going to be late,’ Elsie puffed as she and John caught up with them.
‘Your Eddie gorn back to his ship then,’ as he, Elsie?’ Nellie asked, whilst Molly and June shared eloquent glances. Not for nothing was Nellie known as the cul-de-sac’s most enthusiastic gossip.
‘Last week,’ Elsie confirmed, ‘and our Jim won’t be coming to church this mornin’ either. He’s doing a Sunday shift on the gridiron.’
‘I was just sayin’ to my Gordon last night that I don’t envy them who’s got fellas working on the railways when this war does come. Bound to try to bomb the railways, that Hitler is,’ Nellie announced tactlessly.
‘Why don’t we try and catch up with Frank’s mam?’ Molly suggested hurriedly to June. ‘Then you could ask her how she’s going on.’
‘What’s to stop her asking how I’m going on?’
June challenged Molly, before adding miserably, ‘Oh, our Molly, I’m missing him that much. I never thought it’d be like this.’
Molly squeezed her hand sympathetically.
They had reached the church now and instead of going straight inside as usual, people were gathering outside to talk in angry and anxious voices.
‘It seems so quiet without the children,’ Molly murmured, echoing Nellie’s earlier sentiments. She loved hearing the little ones sing every Sunday.
Almost as soon as she had finished speaking she saw Pearl Lawson hurrying towards the church, defiantly holding the hands of her two children, the expression on her face both mutinous and challenging as she came over to Molly, whilst her husband, George, hung back slightly.
‘I heard as you was down at the school yesterday ’elping with the evacuation,’ she announced to Molly. ‘Sally Walker told me. No way was I letting my two go, not once I’d heard as how they would be mixing with that lot from down the docks,’ she sniffed disparagingly. ‘My kiddies have been brought up to mind their manners. They know how to behave proper, like.’ Ere, Georgie, get that finger out of yer nose,’ she commanded the younger of her two sons crossly, before turning back to Molly and continuing, ‘It’s not right, sending decent respectable kiddies off wi’ the likes of them – Gawd knows what they might pick up. You should be ashamed of yourself, helping to send them away. Mine is staying right here wi’ me.
’Ere, Sally, are you all right?’ she demanded as Sally Walker walked slowly towards them, one hand pressed into the small of her back.
‘Just a bit of backache, that’s all.’
‘How long now before you’re due?’ Pearl asked her sympathetically, deliberately keeping her back turned towards Molly to emphasise her disapproval of Molly’s role in the evacuation.
‘Another two weeks.’
She looked pale and tired, and Molly’s heart went out to her. It must be so hard for her with her husband so far away, and no family of her own to speak of.
The vicar gave a longer than normal sermon, and when his sonorous voice began to read ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me’, audible sobs could be heard from the mothers amongst the congregation.
‘Fancy choosing to read that out,’ Nellie Sinclair complained to Molly once they were all outside again, adding forthrightly, ‘Daft bugger. He should have known it would set all the mams off crying. Did I tell you I saw old Bert this morning? Getting himself in a real state, he is, on account of Alf Davies telling him that he’ll have to have that dog of his put down, dogs not being allowed in air-raid shelters in case they goes wild and bites folks. Thinks the world of it, he does, and who can blame him, since it’s all he’s got? Here …’ She broke off in mid-breath to frown at the sound of a bicycle bell being rung loudly and continuously as a young lad pedalled frantically towards the church, skidding to a halt.
‘It’s war,’ he yelled breathlessly. ‘It’s just bin on the news.’
Immediately Alf grabbed hold of him to question him, whilst the rest of the congregation turned to one another in uncertainty and fear.
Several of the women were crying, including Elsie, Molly saw, whilst the men looked anxious and uncertain what to do. Out of the corner of her eye Molly noticed that Frank’s mother was standing on her own, her face white and set. This was a time for families to be together and automatically Molly started to go over to her.
She had just reached her side, when Sally Walker suddenly collapsed.
‘Oh my Gawd, it’s the shock, it’s gorn and killed her,’ someone said dramatically, whilst one of the other women snorted derisively and said, ‘Don’t talk so daft.’
‘Let me have a look at her,’ Frank’s mother said sharply, and Molly discovered that she was somehow holding Frank’s mother’s handbag and gloves, as the older woman crouched down beside Sally, who was now groaning and moaning and clutching her belly.
The men had stepped back, allowing the women to take over, and were standing together looking slightly embarrassed.
‘Looks like she’s gorn into labour,’ Pearl announced knowledgeably. ‘We’d better get ’er to the hospital.’
‘Her labour’s too far advanced for that,’ Frank’s mother responded, standing up. ‘We’ll have to get the men to carry her to my house.’
‘Well, she did say as how she’d bin having pains,’ Pearl added, ‘but the little ’un isn’t due for another two weeks.’
Molly saw Frank’s mother’s mouth compress. She certainly looked every inch the fearsome hospital ward sister she was known to have been as she instructed some of the men to carry Sally to her house.
‘I’ll need some help …’ Doris Brookes announced.
‘You’ve been havin’ some first-aid lessons, haven’t you, Molly?’ Elsie offered.
Apprehensively Molly started to shake her head. It was true that all the new WVS were being taught first-aiding skills and that she now had her basic first-aiding certificate. She could clean and dress minor wounds, splint broken limbs, and she knew what to do in the case of gas poisoning or minor burns, along with shock and lack of consciousness, but childbirth was not something that had been included in the course.
But before she could say so, Frank’s mother was commanding her sharply, ‘Very well, you’d better come with me then.’
Molly looked imploringly at June but her sister shook her head, her mouth set. Even for Sally, June wasn’t prepared to come to Molly’s assistance and willingly spend time with her future mother-in-law.
Reluctantly Molly followed the small procession being marshalled by Frank’s mother, who was walking alongside Sally whilst the men carried her.
‘You’d best take her up to my Frank’s room but don’t put her on the bed until I’ve covered it with a rubber sheet,’ she warned them. ‘And you – Molly, isn’t it? – you’d better come up as well.’
Obediently Molly followed the men upstairs, into a spick-and-span room with a good-sized bed and gleaming furniture.
‘All right, you can put her down now,’ Doris instructed the men, quickly stripping off the jacket of her suit and then rolling up the sleeves of her blouse.
Sally was lying on the bed with her eyes closed, moaning and whimpering. The men were just straightening up when the sound of an air-raid siren filled the room.
For a few seconds all of them were too shocked to move, and then one of the men said urgently, ‘’Ere, isn’t that that air-raid siren Alf’s been blethering on about? The one he said as meant we had ter get into them ruddy Anderson shelters?’
The men looked at one another and then at Doris.
‘Best get her downstairs again,’ one of them said uneasily.
Sally suddenly screamed loudly.
‘You lot best go,’ Doris told the men calmly, her attention focused on Sally as she bent over her.
The siren was still wailing and Molly longed to clap her hands over her ears to blot out the terrifying sound. The men looked at her but she shook her head.
In the silence that followed the men’s departure, Molly could hear the sound of them running down the street. Terror and panic engulfed her. What if one of the bombs landed right here on Frank’s mother’s house? Cold sweat ran in beads down her face whilst she shivered in fear.
‘Still here, are you?’ Doris demanded as she turned round and saw Molly cowering. ‘Hmm, different kettle of fish it would be if that sister of yours was here.’ She sniffed disparagingly.
‘You’ve got no call to say that about June,’ Molly defended her sister.
‘Mmm, well, since you are here you might as well make yourself useful,’ Doris told Molly grimly. ‘Not that you’re likely to be much use. Wait here a minute.’
She was gone only a few seconds, returning with a white starched overall. ‘Go downstairs, and give your hands a good scrubbing with carbolic soap right up to your armpits, then put this on and come back.’
Molly marvelled that Frank’s mother could remain so calm in the face of the danger they might be in, and then winced as Sally suddenly screamed loudly again.
‘Hurry up,’ Doris chivvied her. ‘I need to examine her and I can’t do that until I’ve scrubbed up meself.’
Molly did as she had been told as quickly as she could, leaving her jacket and blouse downstairs and hurrying back to the bedroom dressed in the voluminous overall she had been given.
‘Scrubbed yourself properly, have you, like I told you?’ Frank’s mother demanded.
Molly nodded her head. Her hands were red and stinging slightly from the carbolic.
‘Good,’ cos we don’t want no dirty germs getting everywhere. You stay here whilst I go and get scrubbed up.’
Sally, who Doris had by now undressed, was moaning and panting, pushing the sheet down off the white dome of her belly.
When Doris came back she was wearing an overall like the one she had given Molly, her hair forced back off her face by the starched cap she was wearing, her arms glowing pinkly from their scrubbing.
Sally’s screams were getting louder, interspersed with sobs and pleas to God to spare her any more pain, but unlike Molly, Doris was unmoved by Sally’s travail. All the while the siren continued and Molly could hear people running and shouting in the street below.
‘She’ll forget all about this once her baby’s been born,’ Doris told Molly confidently as she lifted the sheet and proceeded to examine her patient.
‘By the looks of you, you’ve been in labour a good while,’ she announced disapprovingly to Sally when she had finished.
‘I was havin’ a lot of twinges all day yesterday,’ Sally panted. ‘And then me waters broke just before I left for church.’
‘Well, you are very foolish for not saying so,’ Doris rebuked her sharply.
‘Oh. Oh … oh Gawd, it hurts,’ Sally yelled, grabbing hold of Molly’s hand and holding on so tightly that it felt as though her nails were cutting into her flesh.
Somewhere outside Molly heard a sound she guessed must be the all clear, but between them, Sally and Doris were keeping her too busy to pay any attention to it – Sally with her groans and protests, and Doris with her sharp instructions.
‘Eee. But I’m never gonna let that bugger near me again,’ Sally moaned, gasping for breath. ‘It’s fair killing me, this is.’
‘Push,’ Doris commanded her, ignoring her complaints.
And then, so quickly that Molly could hardly believe it had happened, Sally’s baby slithered into the world and gave his first mewling cry.
As soon as she had cut the birth cord, Doris handed the baby to Molly and told her crisply, ‘Wash him and then give him to Sally,’ before turning back to Sally and cleaning her up.
The baby was so tiny and yet so vigorous, so full of life. Tears blurred Molly’s sight as she washed him carefully in the warm water Doris had told her to bring up earlier. He was bawling, his eyes screwed up and his little legs drawn up towards his distended belly, but then as she washed him he stopped crying and seemed to be trying to focus on her.
A feeling like none she had ever experienced before gripped her. Her emotions were so intense that she wanted to both laugh and cry at the same time.
‘Give him to me, Molly,’ Sally demanded huskily.
Molly looked at Doris, who nodded her head. Very gently she carried the baby over to his mother.
An expression of intense joy flooded Sally’s face as she took hold of him and instinctively put him to her breast.
‘You’re lucky you’re the kind that can give birth as easy as shelling peas,’ Doris told Sally unemotionally, ‘otherwise you might not be smiling right now.’
‘I was frightened I’d be sent away, and I wanted to be here in case my Ronnie gets some leave,’ Sally protested.
Someone was knocking on the door. Nodding to Molly, Doris told her, ‘Take these things down to the back kitchen for me, will you, whilst I go and answer the door.’
The caller turned out to be Doris’s neighbour, come to see how Sally was and to explain that they’d heard that the air-raid siren had simply been a test.
‘Over an hour we was in that Anderson shelter,’ she complained after she had admired the baby, and accepted the offer of a cup of tea.
After that the visitors came thick and fast, and Molly was kept busy making tea and washing up until, at five o’clock, Frank’s mother told her that she could go.
‘You’re not a nurse but at least you’ve got a bit of gumption about you, not like that sister of yours,’ she told Molly grudgingly. ‘What my lad sees in her I’ll never know.’
‘Frank loves our June and she loves him,’ Molly defended her sister heatedly. ‘She’s missing him so much,’ she added.
Was that a small softening she could see in Doris Brookes’s eyes? Molly hoped so.
‘When will Sally be able to go home, only I thought when she does I could go round and give her a bit of a hand?’ she asked quietly, changing the subject.
‘She’ll be back in her own bed tomorrow night,’ Doris answered her.
Why should she be feeling so tired, Molly wondered wearily as she walked home. It was Sally who had had the baby, not her.
‘You’re back, are you?’ June greeted her as she walked into the kitchen. ‘What took you so long? Elsie was round here hours back, saying as how Sally had had a little boy.’
‘People kept coming round to see them and I was making them cups of tea,’ Molly told her tiredly.
‘I don’t know why you wanted to go putting yourself forward like that anyway, offering to help. What do you know about nursing? You’ve changed since you got involved with that WVS lot,’ she accused Molly sharply. ‘Become a bloody do-gooder and helping others rather than your own.’
Molly suddenly realised that June felt threatened by her voluntary work, scared she wouldn’t be there for her, especially now she was so lonely with Frank being away. It made her heart go out to her sister.
‘I didn’t offer; it was someone else who said—’
‘Mebbe not, but you didn’t refuse, did you? A lot of use you must have bin.’
‘I didn’t do anything really, only fetch and carry. Oh, June, the baby is so gorgeous.’ Molly burst into tears. ‘I wish you could have seen him.’
‘Aye, well, I shall have to wait until Sally goes back to her own place. I’m not going knocking on Frank’s mam’s door and begging to be let in.’
‘Why don’t you, June?’ Molly suggested impulsively, adding before June could say anything, ‘She must be feeling lonely without Frank, and worried about him too, just like you are. I know she always seems a bit standoffish, but I’m sure if you let her see how much Frank means to you and sort of, well, talked to her a bit about the wedding and things, make her feel involved—’
‘What?’ June put her hands on her hips and glowered. ‘Me go round there making up to her?
Don’t make me laugh. I’m not going round there to be shown up and told how she wants Frank to marry someone else.’
Molly sighed. She wanted to urge her sister to adopt a less antagonistic attitude towards Frank’s mother, but she could see she was in no mood for such talk.
‘I don’t notice you going round to Johnny’s mam’s, making up to her,’ June accused.
‘That’s different,’ Molly protested. ‘Me and Johnny have only just got engaged, and his mam’s not living on her own.’
‘It seems to me that you aren’t that bothered about poor Johnny. You hardly ever talk about him,’ June sniffed disparagingly.
‘I write to him every day,’ Molly defended herself. It was true, after all, even if Johnny’s letters back to her didn’t arrive with the fatness and frequency of Frank’s to June. She wondered, though, if her regular letter-writing was more down to guilt than anything else. She certainly didn’t look forward to receiving Johnny’s letters, not like June did her Frank’s.
And not like she would have done if it had been Eddie who was writing to her.
‘And you don’t wear Johnny’s ring,’ June pointed out critically.
‘It made my finger go green and you said that that was because it wasn’t proper gold,’ Molly reminded her, trying to subdue her guilty feelings over how much time she now spent thinking about Eddie. Eddie’s warm but gentle kiss had not left her feeling worried and wary like Johnny’s fiercer kiss had done. Eddie was familiar and his return to her life welcome, whereas she felt she hardly knew Johnny at all.
‘Well, that’s as maybe, but from the way you were kissing Eddie Saturday night, no one would ever have guessed you were engaged to someone else.’
Molly could feel her face starting to burn, betraying her guilt.
‘It was you who wanted me and Johnny to be engaged, not me. I don’t want to be engaged to him – I never have,’ she burst out, angry tears filling her eyes. Her heart was thudding and she felt sick, but relieved as well, now that she had finally said how she felt.
She could see how much her outburst had shocked her sister, who was simply standing staring at her.
‘Well, you can’t break your engagement to him now, Molly,’ June said finally. ‘Not with ’im definitely about to go to war. A shocking thing that would be!’ she pronounced fiercely. ‘It would bring shame down on all of us, me and our dad included.’
Molly tried to blink away her tears. A hard lump of misery lay like a heavy weight inside her chest. She knew that what June had said was right, but she still wished desperately that she was not engaged to Johnny.
Because of Eddie?
Something about his gentleness reminded her of Frank. Eddie made her laugh and she felt safe with him. He didn’t possess Johnny’s brash self-confidence, and he didn’t share Johnny’s desire to take things further than she wanted to go. From listening to the conversation of the other machinists, Molly was well aware that not all girls felt as she did. Some of them, like May, actually not only welcomed the advances of men like Johnny, but also actively encouraged them. But May was nearly twenty-two and Molly was only seventeen.
She wasn’t too young, though, to know that the kiss Eddie had given her had been more than that of a childhood friend, and she wasn’t too young either to know that she had liked being kissed by him. They had been children together, she and June playing hopscotch in the street, whilst Eddie and the other boys played football, all of them sitting down together on Elsie’s back steps to eat meat paste sandwiches and drink their milk. It had always been Eddie who had taken Molly’s side and defended her from the others, and Eddie, too, who had comforted her when she had accidentally allowed Jim’s best marble to roll down the street grid. Luckily he and Jim had been able to rescue it. Eddie who had carried her safely piggyback, in the mock fights the close’s children had staged, telling her to ‘hang on’ whilst she had screamed and giggled with nervous excitement. In the winter, when it was too cold to play outside, they had done jigsaws together on Elsie’s parlour table, and then later, when they were more grown up, had scared themselves silly with ghost stories. But then Jim and Eddie had left school and moved into the grown-up world of work, Jim joining his father at the gridiron and Eddie getting work on a fishing boat out of Morecambe Bay so that his visits became infrequent and then fell off altogether.
Molly couldn’t say honestly that she had missed him. She had been busy growing up herself, anxious to follow in June’s footsteps, and leave school and get a job. But now that he’d been back she discovered how much she enjoyed his company, and how their relationship was all the sweeter for the years they had been apart and the growing up they had both done.
But now June’s accusation forced Molly to confront a truth she hadn’t wanted to recognise. It had been bad enough being engaged to Johnny before, but now when the first person she thought of when she woke up in the morning was Eddie, just as he was the last person she thought of when she went to bed at night; when every time she did think about him her heart lifted and bounced so hard against her chest wall that it made her feel dizzy, her engagement to Johnny was an unbearable burden.
‘Where’s our dad?’ Molly asked June. She felt unable to look at her sister, but somehow she had managed to stem her tears.
‘Gone down the allotment to have one of them committee meetings. Uncle Joe came round for him half an hour back.’ June’s voice was terse. ‘Seemingly Uncle Joe has been asked to take charge, and make sure that them as has allotments looks after them proper, like. I heard him telling Dad that he wants to set up some sort of plan so that they can grow enough stuff for everyone in the close. Mind you, it will take a bit more than him telling a few jokes to get some of that lot from the allotments to listen to him. Even Dad admits that some of them are that cussed they won’t listen to anyone.’
