Nancy’s laugh was short. “Scrubbing floors. Washing dressings. Making beds. Running errands. That hospital must have a hundred miles of corridor, and I reckon I run up and down every inch at least three times a day.” She watched Molly for a moment with tired brown eyes. “I’ve been taking driving lessons, Moll,” she said at last. “Nursing’s not for me. I’ve known it for a long time. I want to drive an ambulance. In France or Belgium. Where the fighting is.”
There was a small silence before Molly asked, quietly, “Wouldn’t that be very dangerous?”
“At least I’d be doing something really useful. There are some women drivers already there – France and Belgium – some with the various Red Cross organizations and some with privately organized and financed groups. If I have to knock on every door in London I’ll get myself out there. I’ve quite made up my mind.”
“Then there’s no point in arguing with you, is there?” Molly asked gently. “If there’s one thing I know about you, it’s that.”
Nancy grinned suddenly. “Thanks. Now—” she said, stirring the dirty clothes with her foot, “—what’s all this? I thought from what I’d heard that you’d be up there at the Admiralty battling officialdom, and here I find you playing house—?”
“Even I have to do it sometimes. No one else will. Effie’s gone – she’s working in armaments over at the Silvertown factory – and I sometimes think that the twins don’t know that clothes actually have to be washed occasionally.”
“Have you heard from Jack lately?”
“Yesterday, as a matter of fact. He seems fine. Quite cheerful. It’s hard to tell, of course. He doesn’t really say much.”
“I hear he’s got his stripes? Sergeant Benton, eh? Mam’s proud as punch.”
“Yes.” Molly tinkered with her teaspoon, clicking it against the saucer thoughtfully.
Nancy watched her sympathetically. “Don’t worry, love. It’ll take more than Kaiser Bill to clobber our Jack.”
“Yes, of course.”
“How long’s he been gone now? Three months?”
“Nearly four.”
“He didn’t exactly hang about did he? He must have been one of the first to join?”
“That’s right.” Molly lifted a wry eyebrow, “Seems to me that you can’t keep any of the Bentons from rushing into uniform. Jack. You. Edward in the RFC.” Another name hung in the air unspoken between them.
“Harry,” said Nancy, typically outspoken. “Ironic, isn’t it?”
“Yes it is. But this is different This isn’t someone else’s war. It’s ours. I couldn’t have expected Jack to stay out of it.” Molly held out a hand. “Come and sit in the parlour in comfort. I’ll light the fire. Blow economy for just this once. This is an occasion.”
Watching the newborn, crackling flames as they danced in the hearth Nancy said, “Edward’s been posted to Hornchurch. Home defence. He’s pretty angry about it. He’s talking about trying to get himself posted.”
“Doesn’t he think the Zeppelins will come?”
Nancy shrugged. “They haven’t come yet have they? In spite of all the scaremongering.” She yawned. “I’ll bet more people have been hurt falling about in the dark because of the lighting regulations than have been by any marauding Zeps.”
“I hope you’re right. Chantale was in Antwerp when the Germans bombed it at the start of the war. It isn’t a happy thought that it might happen here.”
“Chantale? Is that one of your pet Belgian refugees?”
“She’s more than that. She’s a Godsend. Although she’s lived all her life in Belgium her mother was English, so she speaks the language perfectly. She was fed up with her work at the hostel where all they do is knit socks and balaclavas. I thought I was doing her a favour when I asked her if she’d like a job here. As it’s turned out the boot’s entirely on the other foot. I don’t know where I’d be without her. She’s virtually running the agency. Which is just as well, since I’ve got my hands full at the store.”
“Does she have a family?”
Molly shook her head sombrely. “Both her parents and her older sister were killed when the Germans went through Belgium. Killed horribly, I think. She rarely mentions them, but when she does she always uses the word murder. She got away, got caught in the fighting at Ypres and then walked on to the coast. She arrived in England, as so many of them have, with not a penny to her name nor a coat to her back.”
“Where does she live?”
“She’s still at the hostel.”
Nancy hesitated for only a moment. “Why don’t you have her here? She could have my flat. It would be more convenient for you, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes, it would. But Nancy – the flat is your home—”
“Well of course it is,” Nancy said briskly, “and it will be again. But it’s a bit silly to leave it empty on the off-chance of an occasional twenty-four hour pass, isn’t it? I can always go to Mam’s. Give the lass the rooms. It’ll be nice to know they’re being lived in. Just make sure that they’re ready for me on the day the guns stop firing.”
In the sudden quiet that followed the words Molly said, “Over by Christmas. That’s what we all thought.” A blast of cold wind buffeted against the window. “All I know is that if the government are handling the war with the same efficiency that they’re handling the food supplies, then we’ll still be fighting next Christmas!”
Nancy looked at her in surprise. “But the papers are saying there’s plenty of food?”
“Oh, there is. The docks are chock-a-block. That’s one of the problems. We’ve sixty per cent higher stocks of frozen meat, a hundred per cent of wheat and barley, and nowhere to put it. The sheds and warehouses that the Admiralty and the War Office have deigned to leave for us are knee-deep in sugar, of all things. The wretched Sugar Commission, in its wisdom, has imported a year’s supply in the last four months! We’re sinking under it. If something isn’t done soon to clear the quays and warehouses we won’t be able to land another grain of rice. What with that the War Office – I mean, I know they need the space, but glory! they aren’t the most efficient people in the world – and the weather, the port’s halfway to chaos. You never know what’s going to be requisitioned next. If the War Office doesn’t get you, the Admiralty does. Talk about the right hand not knowing what the left is doing—”
“But the convoys are getting through?”
“At the moment, yes. We’ve not lost a cargo yet. But Adam’s convinced that the North Sea convoys will be stopped if the German U-boat campaign really begins to bite—” She stopped. Nancy’s breathing was soft and even, her eyes had drifted shut. “Nancy?” Molly said gently.
“Good Lord! I’m sorry.”
“Bed,” Molly ordered. “Off you go.”
“Well, perhaps I will get a bit of shut-eye.” Nancy stood and stretched tiredly. At the door she paused, “Oh, by the way, I saw Chris Edmonton the other day. He sends his regards. He’s a captain, pips and all, safely installed in the War Office filling in forms in triplicate, or so he said. And Felicity is having the time of her life feeding the Boys in Khaki at Victoria Station from her aristocratic little trolley.” Nancy smiled wearily. “She’s having a lovely war.” She closed the door very quietly behind her.
Molly listened to the slow footsteps moving up the stairs. It seemed suddenly as if brutal visions of death hovered just beyond the firelit corners of the peaceful room. The sound of the guns of France and Flanders could sometimes be heard in the streets of London, streets that were full of young and not-so-young men in uniform – and already it was possible to distinguish between the eager and untried recruits and the shabbier men back from the trenches, with their apparently indelibly mud-marked uniforms and shadowed eyes. Each day in the newspapers fresh casualties were reported, and no front page was without its black-edged pictures of fresh-faced young men in uniform who were lost now to mothers, wives, sisters, lovers.
With an abrupt movement Molly leaned forward and stirred the meag
re fire, and the flames, blood-red, leapt up the chimney.
* * *
That first Christmas of war passed, marked in the trenches by a bizarre and singular demonstration of goodwill between enemies and at home by austerity and a determined cheerfulness. On Christmas day a German seaplane attacked Gravesend, at the mouth of the Thames, and escaped unscathed. Ten days before, a Zeppelin had been sighted off the east coast, but had not ventured inland. The incidents, though small, not unnaturally worried the civilian population. For this was a new and totally unknown fear. Never before had a British civilian population been threatened from the air, and reports from Belgium at the beginning of the conflict had been of a kind to conjure horrors in the least imaginative mind.
It was on January 19th in the new year of 1915 that the first Zeppelin raid on Britain finally came. The attack was launched on towns in East Anglia – Yarmouth, Hunstanton, King’s Lynn. Two men and two women were killed and there was much damage done to property. The raid was followed by others, in the same area and on Tyneside. London waited nervously. And as the spring approached, they did not wait in vain; the raiders came.
“Where’s Edward’s precious Flying Corps?” Annie demanded in indignation. She was pregnant again, and her temper was short. “That’s what I’d like to know. The damned Huns do as they like and no one’s stopping them. What’s the matter with our lot? Why don’t they do something?”
Molly looked up from the list she was compiling of guests for a charity concert she was helping to organize in aid of the Red Cross. “Be fair, Annie. They try all right, they just haven’t managed it yet. They say that the bullets go right through the airships and out the other side.”
“I’d give a tooth to see one of them bloody things come down in flames, that I would,” said Annie, unusually vicious.
Annie was not alone in her detestation of the Zeppelin raiders. They cast a shadow of fear out of all proportion to their real threat. As the crews grew more practised and the great ships took to the cover of darkness, many an anxious ear was tuned to the sullen thrum of an engine in the night, many an eye scanned the dark skies for the first sign of the monstrous and apparently invincible apparitions. People grew to recognize a “Zep night” as they might the signs of an approaching storm. Dogs would bark, birds twitter in their nests, disturbed by the vibration of the engines. And each time the monsters came they left behind them a trail of death, destruction and injury while a furiously helpless and demoralized population asked again and again the question that Annie had voiced. Why didn’t somebody do something? And all the while the echoes of the guns filled the air as, across the Channel on the Western Front, the thunderous barrages further pulverized ground already turned to mud by months of shelling, and in that desolation known as the Ypres Salient the nauseous, creeping, blinding clouds of gas stole wraithlike across a dead landscape.
For Molly these were months of frantic activity. For every day spent in productive action it seemed to her that three were spent wrangling with officialdom, filling in forms, or trying to cope with the difficulties caused by the shortage of able-bodied manpower. As troopship after troopship sailed from the docks the jobs the men left behind were filled by old men, women and girls. Molly had reason again and again to bless Chantale Lefèvre’s efficiency as the agency was overwhelmed with requests for workers. She would often work all day at the yard and then come home to work in the evening with Chantale. Nor did her restless energy allow her to stop there; she also threw herself whole-heartedly into fundraising activities for the Red Cross. She persuaded ‘her’ hotels and restaurants to stage charity activities, she wheedled donations from anyone and everyone with whom she came into contact, she organized dances, teas, children’s shows, bazaars, bring-and-buy sales. She filled every spare minute with activity. She was as at home on a windswept quay, a busy customs’ shed or an Admiralty office as she was at a Town Hall function or, more practically, delivering in person a consignment of ‘spoiled’ foodstuff to the home for Belgian refugees, which was another of her adopted projects. When Adam complained, mildly, that if they weren’t careful they would finish up in need of charity themselves – his own pocket having been considerably lightened by Molly’s efforts – she asked him sharply if he had seen the reports in some papers about complaints of war profiteering in food.
“Does it worry you?”
“It worries me that in some few cases it’s true.”
“But not in ours. Not with public fundraiser number one on the staff,” he said amiably.
She lifted her chin in a characteristic gesture. “That’s right,” she said, and marched off to her next appointment. The truce between these two had amounted to an almost total suspension of their personal relationship. Of necessity they spent time together, but always under pressure and rarely alone. They never spoke of anything beyond the need of the moment – the problem of moving and stowing incoming cargo, the stupidity of unnecessarily complicated regulations, the pressing necessity to find someone – almost anyone – to help to run and maintain the compressors. Molly knew nothing of Adam’s private life, forbade herself to see him in any light but that of an efficient and necessary working partner. Above all she was aware as Adam himself was that Jack, in his absence, stood between them now more surely than he ever had in physical presence.
She wrote to Jack with dedicated regularity, filling the pages with the cheerful minutiae of her own life, telling him of Meg’s scrapes, of Kitty’s determined knitting, of her own sometimes hilarious brushes with officialdom, of her fundraising activities. She did not tell him of Danny’s ever-increasing wildness and her concern about it, nor did she mention that a nearby street had been hit and badly damaged by firebombs. She received in return Jack’s own letters, and in them she sensed exactly the same evasion of reality that pervaded her own. He was fine. Wet, cold, tired, but fine. He hoped they were all well. He missed them all. The food was terrible. He’d had a bit of trouble with his ears, but it seemed to be getting better. He doubted he could sleep now, without the sound of the barrage to send him off – no, there seemed no chance yet of leave. His company were being moved back to rest camp – to the reserve trenches – to the front again. The letters were written in smudged pencil, in ink, on any scrap of paper that could be cadged or salvaged. He never ever, even in the privileged, rare, uncensored green-enveloped letters, mentioned the fighting.
One Saturday afternoon in May Molly returned home to find Annie, tea cup resting comfortably on her enormous bulge, settled in the parlour with the twins.
“My God, it’s like winter out there – Annie! Whatever are you doing here?”
Annie raised pencilled red brows. “There’s a welcome.”
“Well you know what I mean. What are you doing this far from home in weather as foul as this? You were due a couple of days ago, weren’t you?”
“That’s right.” Annie was imperturbably cheerful. “Day before yesterday, to be exact. Problem is that you know it, and I know it, but this lazy little beggar doesn’t.” She slapped her swollen belly lightly. Meg giggled. “So I thought a stroll over to see his aunty Molly might shake him up a bit. There’s nothing I hate more than just sitting about waiting for something to happen. Even when the something’s a baby.”
“But Annie, it’s wild out there!” Molly glanced through the window at the driving rain, and trees that bent and lashed in the wind. “You mean you’ve walked all the way round here because you couldn’t think of anything better to do?”
Annie grinned widely. “Something like that I s’pose, yes. I’m neither use nor ornament at home at the moment. I can hardly get behind the shop counter – we’ve got little Rosie Martin in to help Charley – and Sarah’s with the children. You know what kids are – they don’t want their boring old Mum when they can have Gran – so until I get round to performing I’m spare, and I’m fed up with it. I must admit that I didn’t realize the weather was going to turn quite so bad – it is bloody May, after all – I just thought a quic
k run round here might give the idle blighter the hint, that’s all.”
Molly put her hands on her hips and gave her a look.
Annie moved a little uncomfortably in her chair. “All right. So it wasn’t the best idea in the world.”
“You could say that.”
Annie threw back her head and laughed. “The rotten thing about being pregnant,” she informed Meg, “is that absolutely everyone orders you about. Please, Miss,” she teased Molly, “may I finish my tea before you turn me out?”
Molly laughed. “I’ll have one with you. Then I’ll hunt up a cab if I can and take you home. Where are you off to?” she asked Meg, who had jumped to her feet, pulling Kitty with her.
“Were going up to the hostel with Chantale. Don’t you remember? We’re helping her to teach some of the little ones English, and there’s a lesson this afternoon.”
“Oh, of course. Off you go then. Make sure you wrap up well.”
Annie accepted a kiss from each of the girls with a smile.
“Doing their bit then?” she said as the door closed behind them and their young voices calling Chantale echoed up the stairs.
“Oh, they seem to enjoy it. Mind you,” Molly said, wincing a little as the front door slammed enthusiastically shut, “I suspect it’s for different reasons. Kitty goes to teach the children. Meghan, I’m very much afraid, goes to make eyes at a couple of rather attractive young men. She’s a little hard to keep up with, that one. I can’t be behind her all the time.”
“She’ll be all right.” Annie shifted in her chair, and grimaced.
Molly looked at her in concern. “Is something wrong?”
“No, ’course not. But – well, p’raps you’re right. I’d better get home—”
“I’ll get my coat and see if I can find a cab.”
A moment later Molly came back into the room pulling on her still-wet coat, talking as she came: “I have to say that of the three of them, it’s Danny that really worries me – Annie! What is it?”
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