Daughters of War

by Lizzie Page

  ‘They’re my children too,’ I said. I was nearly sobbing but I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing me cry.

  He hissed at me in a lower voice, ‘And if you ever try to get the bloody Home Office involved in my private affairs again, I will destroy you. Do you hear me, May?’

  ‘I hear you,’ I hissed back. I would push him down and run past him. I would get in that house by hook or by crook. I would have my girls back.

  ‘I want to see the girls.’

  ‘You couldn’t be bothered before.’

  ‘Of course I could.’

  ‘You gave up your chance.’

  ‘I was ill and— for goodness’ sake, George, I was at the Battle of the Somme!’ I snapped, losing my cool. I don’t know where it came from, the words just blurted out my mouth. Even now, I couldn’t quite believe that I had been in the eye of the storm, at the Somme. Even if I said it aloud, every day, for the rest of my life, I don’t think I would ever really believe it. Even if I said it in the mirror, heard the words coming out my own mouth, it was hard to believe I had witnessed hell. What does one do with that?

  ‘It was terrible. I couldn’t leave. I knew the children would be safe here in England. Safe with you.’

  ‘I know about the Somme, I saw the film,’ George said tartly. I stared at him, startled. The film? ‘It was on at the cinema, it was rather entertaining.’

  I couldn’t think of a single thing I could say to that.

  ‘I don’t think it was that bad.’

  ‘How…’ I stammered. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘They only showed the worst bits, you know… Not the good bits.’

  ‘What good bits?’

  ‘Where they captured all the Germans. They didn’t show any of that. They wanted us to think it was really bad. Propaganda.’

  I thought of something Elsie had once said to me: everyone’s an expert before they’ve gone to war.

  ‘It was horrendous. I couldn’t… I had to be there.’

  George folded his arms. He looked portly and pleased with himself.

  ‘Don’t you start using it, May.’

  ‘Using it?’

  ‘Oh, poor Mummy-kins was working so hard…’ He sneered at me. ‘You know exactly what I mean.’

  How? How had I ever been taken in by this vile man?

  ‘And what have you been doing all this time?’ I snapped back at him. I would have stuck a white feather up his fleshy nostril right then, if only one had been to hand.

  ‘Essential war work,’ he said smugly.

  ‘What exactly?’

  He tapped his finger on the side of his noise. ‘Mind your own beeswax, May.’

  My fury grew. I was consumed with an unstoppable rage towards him and a hunger to see my children. He wasn’t going to get away with this. I pushed past him and ran into the hall of my old home, my old prison cell. I cried out, ‘Joy? Leona?’, but there was no answer. My voice echoed around the walls and then his voice joined mine, shouting at me to get out.

  ‘Where are they then?’

  ‘Gone.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘As if I’d tell you where.’ He laughed like a maniac. ‘Somewhere safe, where you can’t get to them.’

  I had waited and waited for this for so long. The thought of this Christmas had sustained me these last weeks. And now all hopes were dashed. I felt a despair I had not felt before, even on the worst days of the Somme. I had lost my family. My loves. Hot tears stung my eyes, I could hardly see.

  ‘You can’t do this to me, George.’

  ‘Oh yes, I can,’ he roared as he shoved me down the front steps. ‘Get out and never come back!’

  40

  I sent a telegram to the Pilkington family. I tried not to reveal that I had somehow lost track of my own daughters but there was no avoiding it.

  The reply came mercifully quickly.

  No, the girls are not with us these holidays although we saw Leona in the school carol concert. She sang wonderfully. Merry Christmas.

  * * *

  I felt a mad compulsion to go to the ice rink. It’s not that I thought they were there, more that I felt I might be able to connect with them if I went there. This was where Joy had let me hold her hand. This was where Leona had made a joke about bears. It wasn’t very funny, but her little face: those teeth, those cheeks. Next to me, there was a man in a wheelchair and a woman holding onto the handles. She looked tired and worried. Her hair stood out at odd angles. They too seemed full of nostalgia.

  ‘Skate for me,’ he said. The woman was clearly reluctant and I could hardly blame her. She bristled and curved her body away from the rink, but he was quite insistent.

  ‘Skate for both of us, like we used to.’

  She was slow and hesitant at first – she was nervous – but when she let go of the bar, she was really very good. She glided around, she was a thing of grace, she did figures of eight, then spun in the middle of the rink. I turned, smiling. I thought he must have been very proud. When I next looked at him, I couldn’t see his face: it was hidden by his handkerchief. Then I realised that his shoulders were shaking with grief and I couldn’t stand to see him anymore. This was a stupid idea.

  * * *

  The lawyer was tall, potbellied and grey. Messrs Tom Madison Fletcher and Collinson was engraved on a brass sign next to the shiny door. I had heard from somewhere that Mr Fletcher was American and I thought we might have something in common. He was not, and we did not.

  He sat behind a great mahogany desk and I felt horribly sure the chair where I was sitting was deliberately smaller than his. I thought, where is Madison or Collinson? Fletcher had a privileged face; I imagined he was prone to gout. His watch rested on his large protuberant stomach, making a feature of it. As we talked, the feeling that he had no idea what I was talking about grew larger and larger until that was all that I could see in front of me. The tummy became insignificant compared to his great obliviousness.

  ‘I need to see my girls, Mr Fletcher.’

  ‘How are you going to pay?’ he asked. He was doodling ever-decreasing circles in his notepad. I didn’t know what this said about a person, but I didn’t like it.

  ‘Well, what can we do first?’

  ‘One letter is twenty pounds.’

  ‘Is that it? A letter?’

  He raised his bushy eyebrows at me. ‘I like to call it a shot across the bows.’

  He said ‘bows’ like ‘bowels’. I wondered if that was what he meant.

  I remembered George’s antipathy to ‘scraps of paper’. How was a letter from Messrs Collinson et al. going to affect him?

  ‘I can’t imagine he’ll do much about a letter,’ I said.

  ‘Two letters then?’

  ‘I want to see my children.’

  ‘Three letters for fifty-five pounds,’ he replied, ‘that’s my best offer.’

  * * *

  On the step outside, I rolled myself a Woodbine. If my mother could have seen me now, she would have been disgusted. Sitting on a concrete doorstep would give you piles, at the very least; worse than that, it would make you lower-class. How low I had sunk! I inhaled my cigarette gratefully. The smoke curled free, both upwards and down, and warm into my throat. The sun was setting red over the city. All the hopes I’d had before today were now dashed.

  What would George do with letters from a lawyer? Crumple them up and put them in the fire, no doubt. He’d probably throw on some whisky and watch them burn with his smug, satisfied look. I’m winning, look how May bleeds. I might as well just whistle into the wind for all the good a letter would do.

  I had paid for six.

  Pulling my overcoat around me, I discovered some of the buttons were missing. Matron used to offer to sew them back on, but she hadn’t lately. Despite our rapprochement, she still disapproved of me. George hated me. My mother loathed me. And I couldn’t reach my children. So many enemies, so little time.

  The wind was up. A street full of law firms and ban
ks and accountants. Conspirators. I felt like putting a brick through the windows of the lot of them. If only George had fallen dead at the bottom of those Church steps all that time ago. If only I had walked on by.

  What a mess I had made of it all.

  * * *

  I tried the house one more time. I hammered on the door desperately but George didn’t answer. I knew it wasn’t helping, but I was full of impotent rage. How dare he? I had been sitting there furiously for some time, deciding on my next move, when I saw Mrs Crawford hurrying past. She seemed to have aged years in the twelve months since we had last met. I was so relieved to see her but at the same time I felt quite crazed. I leapt up and pursued her.

  ‘I don’t know where my girls are,’ I said frantically. ‘Do you know where they are? Please, Mrs Crawford.’

  ‘All I know is George has employed a governess,’ she said nervously. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘I heard that, but where are they?’

  She didn’t know. She had seen the girls in the August holidays and again this past October, but Mr Turner hadn’t needed her for Christmas. He’d said he had ‘plans’. I didn’t think it was possible to feel even more heart-broken than I already was, but I did. Observing my despair, Mrs Crawford added quickly that the girls were as happy and as tennis-crazy as ever. I felt sick with jealousy that she had seen them and I hadn’t. It’s not her fault, I reminded myself. Be fair.

  ‘Are they furious with me?’

  ‘Never!’ she said and her tone was reassuringly certain. ‘You know the girls – they love you.’

  I won’t sob, I told myself.

  ‘How is your James?’ I asked, remembering the sweet young man with a cloth cap who would sometimes mow our lawn or run errands for us.

  ‘Dead,’ she said.

  The telegraph came on her birthday. She had thought it was him sending birthday wishes. I couldn’t imagine how horrendous that must have been.

  ‘He always remembered my birthday,’ she said mechanically, and it was like she had said this so many times before that it had lost meaning. ‘Always a little something.’

  ‘I am so sorry, Mrs Crawford.’

  She squeezed my fingers. ‘‘At least the girls are safe. Your children are alive, Mrs Turner.’

  I nodded. There was nothing I could add to that.

  * * *

  I was afraid Elizabeth wouldn’t answer the door, but she did. She stood, her face serious, hair swept back, that beautiful white brow. The pale lips, pale teeth, pale eyes all somehow framed by the doorframe, and all looking angrily at me.

  ‘You said you’d come to Dover,’ was the first thing she said.

  ‘I know, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘I needed you there.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I waited for you.’

  ‘So, what happened?’ I asked cautiously. This was going far worse than I had imagined. ‘Are you the first lady to swim the Channel?’

  She looked at me incredulously, then, shaking her head from side to side, said: ‘I thought you were coming, I thought you were doing a big surprise reveal – ta-da, here I am! You were always so reliable.’

  ‘I should have sent a telegram, Elizabeth. I am so sorry. Just… What happened?’

  ‘They wouldn’t even let me get to the beach.’

  ‘No! Who wouldn’t? Why?’

  ‘Everything was arranged. The conditions were perfect. The tides. The weather. My fitness. They said the Channel was riddled with U-boats, it wasn’t safe.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Elizabeth.’

  ‘Well, you can’t borrow my car. I’m afraid I need it.’

  ‘I don’t want the car. Oh, Elizabeth!’ I said. I had never seen her so furious or so miserable. ‘I did write though. Did you not get my letters?’

  She shook her head. ‘Delia has a habit of destroying the post.’

  ‘Please.’

  Finally, she let me in to that cool elegant room in my favourite pale elegant house. As she went to fetch tea, I joked that I would do anything for a macaroon, but she raised an eyebrow humourlessly: ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’

  I could think of plenty of retorts, but I didn’t rise to it.

  Usually, all the windows would be open, but I was slightly relieved to note that only about half were. I sat down in my usual armchair and listened as Elizabeth’s footsteps faded away. I still felt shaky: George. The lawyer. Mrs Crawford. I could hardly breathe.

  The chess set was on the table to my left and I gazed at the figures. I wondered who Elizabeth had been playing. Was Harriet Dobinson a chess player? White had the advantage: I estimated it was only four moves from victory.

  There was a newspaper cutting on the table to my right. I read it greedily. Woman’s Channel bid fails.

  Poor Elizabeth, I thought. It was a nasty little piece:

  This self-admitted suffragette didn’t even get started. While our boys suffer in France, Miss Martin bemoans the lack of training facilities for girls. While our boys fight for their country, Miss Martin poses in her skimpy swimming costume. Back to the kitchen for you, Miss Martin.

  Her skimpy swimming costume? I felt furious. What was she supposed to wear?

  But I had let her down too. I was part of the problem. I must have fallen asleep some time after that. I woke up at about 3 a.m. I was under a blanket; the lamp had been extinguished, the curtains drawn and everywhere I looked seemed black and hopeless.

  * * *

  In the morning, Elizabeth came in with coffee for me and drew back the curtains with a flourish. The cats slipped around the door and jumped up onto my lap. It was comforting to see them. Elizabeth seemed in different spirits today: she asked me about the girls and George and France and I told her everything, weeping a little as I did so. She was kind and comforting in her uniquely bracing way and I assumed all the tension of the night before had been forgotten. While we ate porridge for breakfast she told me funny stories about her mother and her mother’s friends and we laughed a lot.

  But later that afternoon, we went walking on the common and when we saw troops on their exercises, Elizabeth wouldn’t stop staring. Eventually, she turned her face to me, and I saw she looked utterly distraught again.

  ‘I suppose you also think I’m a do-nothing. A silly shirker with her silly dreams and her silly cats.’

  ‘I’d never think that of you.’ I was going to add, ‘or the cats’, but Elizabeth clearly wasn’t in the mood. I was startled by this change of tone. I had never known her to talk so negatively about herself.

  ‘Everyone is contributing to the war effort. And what about me?’

  This really wasn’t like Elizabeth.

  ‘I certainly don’t think that.’

  ‘Everyone else does. And now I’ve failed.’

  ‘But you can still do the swim this year, can’t you?’

  ‘It’s not actually going to happen though, is it? No one is prepared to support me like they support the men. Some man will come along, and they will run around for him. Not me though. I can hardly find a place to swim to practise, never mind anyone who would train me. It’s just a self-indulgent pipe dream. And women must not be self-indulgent. Or dream. I know it, and you know it too.’

  I didn’t know what to say. I wanted Elizabeth to be happy. She had helped me to find my path, I owed it to help her back to hers.

  ‘But you still have your meetings and your teaching…’

  Elizabeth lowered her gaze.

  ‘I was thrown out.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The refugee centre, they made me leave. I was teaching the students about the suffragettes and, well, apparently there was a complaint.’

  The image of some stuffy school manager overhearing Elizabeth’s radical lectures made me laugh. A snort escaped me.

  ‘It’s not funny, May!’ said Elizabeth irritably.

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘And I’m plump,’ she went on.

  ‘You’re not,’ I sa
id, for she looked healthier than ever, broad and strong.

  Elizabeth tossed her hair. ‘Oh! I even bore myself sometimes. The problem is, I haven’t swum for six weeks now and it always makes me feel quite cuckoo.’

  I took her arm in mine, laughing. ‘Cuckoo? You? Never!’

  ‘Anyway, we’ll get you to see your girls, May,’ she said, suddenly restored to her old self-confident self. ‘We will find a way.’

  And I believed her. I always did.

  Things I adore about Louis

  His diplomacy/tact!

  The way he kisses me.

  His blue eyes and those eyelashes.

  His mouth.

  His jowls! He doesn’t like them, but I do!

  His shoulders. Broad.

  His long legs.

  His impeccable manners.

  His calm temperament.

  His kindness. I have never known kindness like it.

  His constancy. He is trust-worthy. He always wants the best for me.

  41

  Back, back, back to France. Back to the frozen mud plains, back to hell. My mood was lower than ever. Perhaps this was the place where I fitted best. Perhaps this was the only place I belonged now. Where I had once felt full of purpose, I now felt crushed by limitations. How I missed my girls. I had left the presents outside the house – who knew if they’d get them? It was the first Christmas I had not spent with them. I wrote to them every day. Nothing came from them.

  * * *

  We had more terrible news: Matron’s husband was killed. It was Kitty who told me. ‘May, something sad has happened.’

  Matron was writing a letter when I ran into our tent. I knew she wouldn’t look to me for comfort, but we were room-mates after all. Who else was there? We mightn’t always see eye to eye, but this, this, I felt I could help her with.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Matron.’

  She ignored me. The only way I knew she had heard was because she hesitated just for one moment before she lowered her pen into the ink.