Читать книгу Better Days will Come - Pam Weaver - Страница 11

When Grace got back home, to her surprise, Rita still wasn’t back from school. She wasn’t unduly concerned. Rita had probably stayed on in the gym for netball practice or something. Grace set about getting the tea ready. She didn’t have many potatoes left in the enamel bin. She had seen some seed potatoes in Potter and Bailey’s but if you bought them, you had to sign a paper to say you were going to use them for planting. Grace supposed they would come round to your house and check up on you in the spring so she didn’t chance it. She only peeled two. That would be plenty for her and Rita. Bonnie was the one with the big appetite. She sighed and bit back her tears. This was almost as bad as the feeling she’d had when Michael was killed. Almost but not quite.

The loss of her husband was final, she’d known as soon as she’d got the telegram that she would never see him again, but the ‘loss’ of her daughter was cloaked in hope, the hope that one day she would walk through that door again. She sighed. She didn’t want to think of Bonnie ill or, worse still, lying in a ditch somewhere, but sometimes the darker thoughts crept in uninvited. She cleared her throat and swallowed the aching lump that had formed. Be rational, she told herself. There was no reason to think that any harm had befallen her. She had to accept that Bonnie had run away, that was all.

Seeing Norris had unsettled her again. Whatever women saw in the man now she couldn’t think, but when they were young, he had been a lot better looking and he could charm the birds from the trees with that silver tongue of his. He’d made no secret of his desire for her when they were youngsters but why now? Why did he still want her when he could have the pick of any girl in Worthing? The years hadn’t been kind to him. These days he was a thickset man with large jowls and a paunch. The richer he became the less attractive he became but he didn’t seem all that bothered. He really thought money could buy him anything and he was ruthless. The business with the rent had been going on for years and because people were reluctant to talk about money it had taken ages for them to realise that they were all paying different amounts. There was no doubt that if he cut Grace’s rent, it would make life a lot easier, especially now that Bonnie’s wage wasn’t coming into the house, but she wasn’t going to succumb to him – even if she had to wear frayed jumpers and eat half a potato for her dinner for the rest of her life. She still had her pride and her good name, for God’s sake.

As well as the potato shortage, there was a paper shortage and the butcher had said there was little hope of poultry being on the menu for Christmas, unless, of course, she wanted to use the black market. Grace had never done that. She didn’t want to do it on principle and besides, they charged such high prices.

Rita burst through the door in a state of high excitement and, hardly stopping to draw breath, she blurted out that she’d been to Hubbard’s.

‘Whatever for?’ Grace wanted to know.

‘I thought someone might be able to tell me something about Bonnie, Mum.’

Grace stiffened. ‘And did they?’

‘Not exactly,’ said Rita. ‘When I got there, the girl in the office thought I had come for an interview.’

Grace lowered herself onto a chair. ‘We always said you would leave school at Easter.’

‘I know, Mum, but hear me out, will you? This woman – she had tightly permed hair and a big tummy like you wouldn’t believe – she rattled off so many questions, I could hardly think straight. She looked such a sight, Mum.’ Rita waved her arms and strutted about, mimicking the woman and making her mother smile, in spite of herself.

‘What sort of questions?’

‘Was I punctual, did I have a clean bill of health, did I have clean habits, was I teachable and how would I treat a difficult customer. By the time I cottoned on to what was happening, Mum, I felt too embarrassed to say anything. So I ended up being marched up to the ladies’ fashion department.’

By this time, Grace was laughing.

‘It’s so different now,’ Rita went on. ‘There’s no trace of the fire and it looks really classy.’

The whole town had been stunned by the fire which ripped through Hubbard’s in the early hours of Wednesday 22nd August. The upper floors had been totally gutted and the damage below was extensive. The fire itself was put out in less than an hour but it took no less than twenty fire crews to do the job, some coming from as far away as Crawley. The family firm reopened the store in time for Christmas, just, and although they had paid their staff since the fire, it was rumoured that they were already short-staffed.

‘I was only there five minutes when I was introduced to Miss Bridewell, the manageress,’ Rita went on, her eyes dancing with excitement. ‘“Would you consider being a Saturday girl, Miss Rogers?”’ Rita mimicked her affected accent. ‘“The run up to Christmas can be hectic and you seem a very capable gel.”’

Grace stopped laughing and put her hand to her mouth. Rita was a bright girl. She had passed the eleven-plus and made it to the grammar school and for that reason, Grace had wanted Rita do an extra year, but she would be sixteen in February. Was it time to let her go out to work?

‘But what about your weekends at the Railway Café?’

Rita worked there every Saturday morning, clearing tables and helping with the washing up. The owners Salvatore and Liliana Semadini, Italians, had taken over in 1945. Before then it had always been a rather dingy place and not very clean but with Salvatore’s cheerfully optimistic outlook, it had completely changed. Liliana was a brilliant cook who could make a little go a very long way.

‘I’m sure they’ll understand,’ said Rita doggedly.

Her mother wasn’t about to give up so easily. ‘And then there’s secretarial college? We had such plans …’

‘Mum, they were your plans, not mine. Oh please let me go. This is an opportunity too good to miss. I like being around people. You know me, I like talking. If I was in a typing pool, I wouldn’t be allowed to say a word to a soul all day.’

‘But being able to type opens up all sorts of possibilities,’ Grace insisted.

‘Miss Bridewell said if I suit, I can start as a full-time shop assistant in January. January 5th. It’s a Monday.’

Grace couldn’t think straight. This was a disappointment because from the moment they were born, she had such plans for her girls. The war had changed everything. There were such good opportunities for women in the jobs market now. She knew Bonnie had wanted to be a nursery nurse, and Grace had been happy with that, but now that the girl had gone, would she get her training? She couldn’t do anything about Bonnie but she could do something about Rita. Grace knew that if Rita could get a secretarial post, she would never have the kind of worries about money that she had endured. Shop work was all well and good but it didn’t pay very well.

Rita was pressing for an answer. ‘So what do you say, Mum?’

There was no doubt that having Rita at work would be a godsend. Her money would make up the shortfall without Bonnie’s wage. Grace was already behind on the coal money and if they had another winter like last year and had to cut down any more, they’d both freeze to death long before the spring came.

‘Mum?’

‘I still want you to learn to type,’ Grace insisted.

‘I can go to night classes.’

Grace made a big thing of giving in, but in truth she was relieved. She agreed to let Rita become a Saturday girl for the whole of December and to begin in the fashion department on January 5th.

Bonnie was as content as she could be under the circumstances but she missed her home in Worthing and she missed her mother and Rita terribly. As she walked around the shops in Oxford Street on her afternoon off, she was missing her friend Dinah as well. How they would have loved trying on the dresses and taking tea in Lyons Corner House together.

Up until now, the full extent of bomb damage in the capital had eluded her. There had been several bombing incidents in Worthing but nothing on the scale she saw in London. Large areas were screened off but the obvious gap in the buildings told her straight away where a house or a shop was missing. Although it was strictly forbidden, the bombsites were swarming with boys playing war games and cowboys and Indians. In some areas, whole streets had been reduced to rubble. Shortages of building materials meant that rebuilding the nation’s capital was a slow business.

Shortages of other commodities were acute as well. Women still found it necessary to queue for hours outside a butcher’s or a grocer’s and Bonnie was surprised to see that large areas of public parks were still given over to allotments. There were few cars on the streets either. Petrol rationing kept their numbers down to a bare minimum.

Bonnie was lonely and friendless but the money in her post office account was mounting up. She was careful not to spend a shilling more than she had to. Once her waistline started to expand it wouldn’t be long before she’d have to dip into her savings in order to live. Soon she’d have to find a place where she could go to have the baby and then there was the thorny problem of what she would do after that. Where would she live? More importantly how could she take care of the baby and support them both?

When these things weren’t swirling around in her head, Bonnie struggled with a terrible ache in her heart. Why, oh why hadn’t her romance with George worked out? What had she done wrong? She couldn’t … wouldn’t believe he was a rotter. Hadn’t he told her time and again how much she meant to him? He’d made plans for his son from the moment she’d told him she was pregnant. She smiled fondly. He’d been so sure the baby was a boy.

‘Of course it’s a boy,’ he’d said with a mixture of indignation and pride when she’d challenged his assumptions. ‘That’s my boy. In my family, the first one is always a boy.’ And when she’d laughed, he’d kissed her until she was breathless.

It was quite ridiculous but the thing she worried about most of all was the locket George had given her. It was her first real present and when he had given it to her, George had declared his undying love. It wasn’t new. The catch looked a bit insecure but she was sure that if it did come off it would only fall into her bra. She must have dropped it in the factory because she remembered fingering it just outside the door.

When she’d arrived at the old factory on that last day in Worthing, it was deserted but the door leading to the street was open. She’d heard someone moving about in a room somewhere inside and had gone to see if it was George but she was met by a man in a brown overalls she presumed was the caretaker. He had his back to her and didn’t know she was there but she’d panicked and made a bolt for the entrance, tripped and dropped her bag. She was just by the door when he spotted her and shouted. She’d been so anxious to get away she’d just stuffed everything in her bag and run. The locket must have been lost then. If only she had stopped and turned around for a minute, she might have seen it on the ground. She missed it very much. Apart from the baby, it was the only thing she had to remember George by.

To ease her anguish, Bonnie began to write letters to the address in Pavilion Road. She didn’t post all of them, but every chance she got she told George about her day. Of the three or four that she did post, she wrote her address at the top of the page and begged him to let her know how he was. Through her tears, she promised not to make any demands on him. She only needed to know that he was alive and well. She did her best to make the letters upbeat. He mustn’t know how miserable she was. Once the envelope was sealed, she put her name and address on the back so that Mrs Kerr could get in touch with her and tell her if George was ill or something. Sometimes Bonnie was so miserable she thought she was losing her mind with grief but there was something within her that wanted the whole world to know how much she cared for him.

She did make contact with someone – Miss Reeves. Bonnie had remembered seeing an advertisement in the local paper with a box number for replies. That gave her the idea of going to the post office and asking about it. Bonnie discovered that, for a small rental fee, she could have her own box number with a key in the local branch. It was an ideal way of keeping in touch without anyone knowing where she lived. She reasoned that she had upset her mother enough so she would not worry her again but she was desperate for news of her and her sister. Miss Reeves was the obvious choice. At Sunday school she had made much of honesty and being trustworthy, so Bonnie wrote to her, asking for information about her family. In her letter, she explained that she could not, for very personal reasons, contact them herself, and asked Miss Reeves to send her news of her mother and sister.

Bonnie did her level best to stop thinking about George all the time but the bittersweet memories kept slipping through the crevices of her mind. She was careful not to let Richard or Lady Brayfield see her upset, but night after night her pillow was wet with tears.

Richard turned out to be a boy with a real thirst for knowledge. After a cautious beginning, he and Bonnie quickly became friends. She did her best to keep him occupied whenever he was in the house. After a while, even she could see that Lady Brayfield was less stressed with life. It seemed that if the boy was happy, everyone else was happy. The whole household was more relaxed.

Lady Brayfield visited her daughter two or three times a week.

‘She’s looking better all the time,’ she confided in Bonnie, and nothing more was said about Kenya.

Bonnie was more or less left to her own devices. So long as Richard was happy, Lady Brayfield left them to it. Richard had a fairly full timetable. Bonnie made sure he ate a good breakfast and then they walked to the prep school where he was a dayboy. He was an average student but under Bonnie’s tuition, or perhaps it was her encouragement that helped him go that extra mile, his grades began to show a marked improvement. Whenever she could, Bonnie took Richard to see the sights of London. They would walk around Trafalgar Square, or go up to Buckingham Palace. Richard’s favourite place in the whole world was the British Museum. He loved looking at the fossils and stuffed animals in cases and gradually his enthusiasm sparked a similar interest in Bonnie.

Back in the town house, she taught him to play whist and patience while he taught her the rudiments of chess. He beat her every time (which he loved) but gradually she got the hang of it. In the evenings, when he’d finished his homework, they would read together, do jigsaws or make Meccano models. Bonnie wasn’t so good at the model making, but it gave Richard a real sense of achievement to be able to show an adult what to do. He never talked about his father but at night as he knelt by his bed, he always prayed for his mother.

‘God bless Mummy and please help her to get better. I miss her very much but I pray she won’t miss me and be unhappy.’

His prayer never failed to bring a tear to Bonnie’s eye. What was her own mother doing now? With Christmas only three weeks away, she’d be sorting out the Thrift Club. It was only a small thing but it made such a big difference to her neighbours. Her mother was always thinking of others. Bonnie was proud of her and longed to give her a hug and tell her so. She missed her so much and the small house where they lived had taken on a romantic rose-coloured hue in her memories. Bonnie forgot about the lack of privacy, the freezing cold bedrooms and the fact that she had to wash in the scullery. All she remembered was the fun and laughter she, Rita and Mum shared together.

As she tucked Richard into his bed, she was thinking about the singsongs they’d had around the piano. That piano was her mother’s pride and joy, a present from Dad when they were young. Mum was a good pianist and she could pick up a tune in no time. Her father always said she could have been aconcert pianist but Mum would push his arm playfully and say, ‘Get away with you, you daft ’apeth.’

Bonnie’s voice cracked slightly as she said, ‘Goodnight, Richard’, but the boy didn’t notice.

Turning over he snuggled down under his eiderdown with a sleepy, ‘’Night.’

Bonnie’s evenings were her own. If she had no socks to darn (even the wealthy darned their socks it seemed) Bonnie could sit with Dora and Cook in the little parlour and listen to the radio or she could spend time in her own room, knitting booties and matinee jackets for the baby.

Cook and Dora had worked for Lady Brayfield for years. They didn’t talk a lot but it didn’t take Bonnie long to realise that life hadn’t been kind to them. Dora was roughly the same age as Lady Brayfield. They had played together as children.

‘My mother worked in the big ’ouse,’ Dora told her with pride. ‘She cleaned the master’s rooms. Lady Brayfield says she were the best cleaner they ever ’ad.’

When she was sixteen, Dora had fallen for a smooth-talking man and been ‘put in the family way’ as Cook put it. Her baby was stillborn and Dora was so upset she had been declared mentally unstable and put into an institution. It took Lady Brayfield more than twenty years to get her out. The years of incarceration had left Dora deeply scarred. She was a slave to routine and became upset at any deviation but she was a hard worker. Grey-haired, even though she couldn’t be more than forty, Dora was a heavy woman with square hard-working hands.

If Dora was chunky, Cook was dainty. Standing at less than five foot tall, Cook was reluctant to even tell anyone her name. She was an intelligent woman but she found socialising difficult. Bonnie had no idea what had happened to Cook but a chance remark from Lady Brayfield made her wonder if Cook had been the victim of child cruelty. The pair of them were quite content to live together as friends, supporting each other and devoting themselves to the care of the woman who had rescued them and given them their lives back again. They never intruded on Bonnie’s privacy but they were welcoming whenever she wanted to share her off duty time with them.

But tonight Bonnie was in no mood for company. As she climbed the stairs to her room, Lady Brayfield called her downstairs into her sitting room. Bonnie’s heart began to beat faster as Lady Brayfield closed the door behind them.

‘Bonnie, I haven’t been disappointed since you came here,’ she began. ‘But the time has come … You cannot stay here in your condition.’

Bonnie nodded miserably.

‘Although you hardly show at the moment, I think you will agree that we must act before Richard has the slightest idea that you may be pregnant. Have you had morning sickness?’

Bonnie shook her head. ‘That finished long before I came.’

‘Have you said anything to Dora and Cook?’

Bonnie shook her head.

‘When you came I proposed that you might stay until the end of January,’ Lady Brayfield continued, ‘but I overheard Dora mentioning to Cook that she thought you might be in the family way. They had no idea I was there, or I am sure they wouldn’t have said it. However, it’s left me wondering if you’ve said anything.’

‘No, Madam,’ cried Bonnie. ‘Honestly I haven’t.’

Lady Brayfield looked thoughtful.

‘I shall start looking for somewhere to live straight away,’ Bonnie said quickly. She was struggling with her emotions. She would be sad to leave this house and her generous employer, but she had no wish to cause any embarrassment.

‘Have you any idea what you would like to do?’

Bonnie smiled wistfully. ‘I always wanted to look after children,’ she said, ‘but it’s hard to imagine how I could with my own baby to look after.’ Her eyes were brimming with tears and she willed them not to fall. ‘I would like to try and keep the baby but if I can’t, I’ll have to let him go for adoption.’

‘It’s not widely known,’ Lady Brayfield said softly, ‘but the government has made provision for single women to keep their babies. Would you like me to make some enquiries?’

Bonnie’s face lit up. ‘Would that mean I could keep my baby?’

‘It won’t be easy,’ said Lady Brayfield. ‘You’ll have to find somewhere to live and you’ll probably have to run the gauntlet when it comes to mean-spirited judgemental moralists.’

‘I don’t care what people think,’ Bonnie said fiercely. ‘I made an honest mistake.’

‘Perhaps it might be better to pretend you had a husband who was killed.’

Bonnie looked thoughtful. Eventually she said, ‘I hate lies. My mother always said a liar had to have a good memory.’

‘Your mother sounds like a remarkable woman,’ Lady Brayfield remarked. ‘Bonnie, are you sure that you couldn’t go back home?’

‘No,’ said Bonnie.

‘If it’s a question of the train fare …’

‘It’s not that. It’s the shame. I could never go home and shame my mother.’ She stood to leave.

‘Then I shall make some enquiries.’

‘May I ask one thing?’ Bonnie asked cautiously.

Lady Brayfield held her gaze.

‘May I ask why you are helping me like this?’

‘You remind me of someone I once knew,’ said Lady Brayfield turning towards the drinks cabinet. Keeping her back to Bonnie, she reached for the sherry and Bonnie knew she would not be drawn further.

As Bonnie opened the sitting room door she hesitated.

‘Is there something else, Bonnie?’

‘Thank you,’ she said, and the two women smiled.

‘By the way,’ Bonnie reminded her, ‘I’m taking Richard to buy some Christmas presents. We plan to go to Selfridges after school.’

Lady Brayfield nodded. ‘Does he have enough money?’

‘He’s saved almost £5 of his own pocket money,’ said Bonnie closing the door softly.

As she walked upstairs, it occurred to her that she would have to use some of her precious savings to buy presents for Lady Brayfield, Richard, Dora and Cook. She groaned inwardly but the moment the thought skittered through her mind, she was eaten up with guilt. How could she resent buying gifts for the very people who had been so kind to her? Wasn’t giving to others what Christmas was all about?

When the Christmas cards started to arrive at the house, Bonnie decided that she would at least send a card to her mother and sister. Woolworth’s had single cards, and she’d bought one. She didn’t have to put her address on it and even if her mother saw the London postmark, London was a very big place.

Alone in her room, Bonnie got the card out again but she couldn’t think what to write inside. Was it wise to rake up all those memories? Her mother would most likely have settled back down to normal life. What right had she to upset her again? How different everything had been last Christmas when she and Rita had put up the decorations together. They hadn’t been up to much. The same things had been up and down for all the Christmases Bonnie could remember. ‘I’ll get you some new ones next year, Mum,’ she’d promised.

‘Get some pretty ones with plenty of glitter,’ Rita had said.

A lump formed in Bonnie’s throat. She wouldn’t be keeping her promise and she wouldn’t see the old ones going up either. Sick at heart, Bonnie wrote a short note inside, addressed the envelope and stuck on a stamp, but she put the Christmas card in a drawer.