Christmas with the Bomb Girls

by Daisy Styles

  Rosa’s thoughts drifted back to Italy, to weddings she’d celebrated with street parties, the bride and the groom sheltered from the sweltering heat under a white canopy as they enjoyed a banquet of local food and wine with friends and family. Edna’s marriage in a stark Northern church on the edge of the Pennines was a world away from her Italian landscape, but it was no less beautiful.

  When the bride and groom walked up the aisle, arm in arm with huge, happy smiles on their faces, the congregation clapped and cheered as the band played out Edna’s all-time favourite, ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’. Outside, to the newlyweds’ delight, a crowd of munitions girls formed a guard of honour all the way down the path from the church porch to the gate. As snow fell and the munitions girls formed an arch for Edna and Malc to walk under, hand in hand and laughing with happiness, they emerged at the end of the line, where guests showered them with confetti that combined with large, floating snowflakes that showered down on their heads.

  ‘Time to throw my bouquet,’ Edna announced.

  Malc stared at her. ‘Throw your bloody bouquet?’ he gasped in disbelief. ‘It only cost me nearly a week’s wages!’ he spluttered.

  ‘It’s the tradition,’ Edna explained. ‘Whoever catches it will be the next bride.’

  ‘It seems bloody daft to me,’ Malc muttered mutinously. ‘Mebbe I’ll catch it and flog it on!’ he chuckled.

  ‘Can’t break with tradition,’ Edna said cheerfully. ‘It’s bad luck.’

  ‘Go on, my lass, bad luck is the last thing we need, chuck it one!’ he laughed.

  And with that, she whizzed her beautiful red roses up into the air. ‘CATCH!’ she cried to the guests.

  Every single woman rushed forward, but Gladys just happened to be right where the bouquet landed; in fact, if she hadn’t moved as quickly as she did, it would have landed on her head!

  ‘Got it!’ she cried, as she clutched it tightly.

  ‘Oooh,’ said Nora. ‘I wish I’d caught it. I need a bit of luck in the wedding department.’

  ‘We can share it, sweetheart,’ Gladys said generously. ‘It’s not like I’m going to be married soon.’

  Maggie gave her a cheeky wink. ‘Wanna bet on that, our Glad?’ she teased.

  It was fortunate that the Black Bull was only a five minute walk from the church, because by the time Arthur (using Malc’s old Brownie camera) had taken photographs the snow was falling fast. The pub was warm and welcoming, with a roaring log fire, and the wedding-breakfast tables were prettily set out with white crêpe paper and little bunches of holly arranged along the middle. As guests warmed themselves by the fire, dusting snow and confetti from their coats, Ted, the genial landlord, circulated with trays of sweet sherry and port.

  ‘On the house, so stop fretting,’ Ted whispered as he handed husband and wife a large glass apiece. ‘Congratulations: it couldn’t have happened to a better couple.’

  ‘CHEERS!’ cried Malc and Edna as they clinked glasses and sipped the sweet liquid, which quickly warmed them up.

  There was a table near the door piled high with presents from guests and friends, who, Edna knew, would have saved all their ration coupons for the specific purpose of buying the newly-weds gifts. A lump rose in Edna’s throat; it was without doubt the best day of her life, and she thanked God for it and for her friends’ and family’s boundless generosity.

  Ted was true to his word about the quality of the locally sourced pork: it was roasted to perfection and served with sweet apple sauce, roast potatoes, sprouts and gravy, which was greatly appreciated by the hungry guests, who also marvelled at the sherry trifle that Maggie had provided.

  ‘I don’t know where she got her hands on all that cream,’ Edna whispered as she dipped her dessert spoon into the delicious cream and custard topping.

  ‘The less you know about that, sweetheart,’ Malc murmured under his breath, ‘the better.’

  ‘Can you promise me you won’t finish up in the clink before our wedding day’s over?’ Edna asked nervously.

  ‘If anybody tries locking me up today, I’ll have their guts for garters!’ Malc chuckled.

  Arthur, Malc’s best man, delivered his moving speech while gently rocking a sleeping Stevie in his arms. Afterwards, Flora surprised everybody by rising to her feet.

  ‘I’ll keep this short,’ she said as she spotted Gladys organizing the band in the corner of the pub. ‘I know the dancing’s going to begin soon, but I just wanted to say, in public, how proud my daughters and I are of their new nana and my new mum.’ The clapping and cheering that followed nearly brought the roof down. ‘We lost each other for twenty-seven years,’ Flora said, holding her mother’s gaze. ‘But being with you now, believe me, feels as natural as breathing.’ Raising her glass of Guinness, she said, ‘God bless the happy couple – God bless my mum!’

  After keeping her emotions in check all day, Flora’s short speech completely undid Edna, who burst into tears. Marilyn and Catherine, concerned that their nana was unwell, rushed to her side.

  ‘Nana, Nana,’ they cried as they hugged her.

  ‘Are you not well?’ Marilyn asked solemnly.

  ‘I’m very well, sweetheart,’ Edna replied, mopping tears from her face with her best lace hankie. ‘In fact, I’ve never felt better in mi life!’

  ‘Then why are you crying?’ Catherine asked, puzzled.

  ‘Because I’ve found something precious that I thought I’d lost,’ Edna replied as she kissed each little girl on the cheek. ‘You and your mum!’

  The newly-weds took to the floor for the first dance: a waltz to the strains of ‘Yours Till the Stars Lose Their Glory’, which they danced to while gazing deeply into each other’s eyes. As the guests joined in, Edna jolted Malc back to reality with the question that had been foremost in her mind for several weeks.

  ‘Sweetheart, when are you going to tell me where we’re going for our honeymoon?’ she murmured.

  Malc sighed. ‘I suppose now’s as good a time as any,’ he replied. ‘First off, we’re going to my house tonight – we don’t want to be sharing our marriage bed with them granddaughters of yours,’ he said with a sly wink. ‘Then, on Boxing Day, we’ll catch the train with Flora and the girls: they’ll get off at Penrith, but we’ll stay on,’ he added with a mysterious smile.

  ‘For pity’s sake, man!’ Edna cried as he swung her round the floor to the music. ‘Put me out of my misery once and for all.’

  ‘We, my sweetheart, are going to Edinburgh for our honeymoon!’ he finally announced triumphantly.

  Edna burst out laughing. ‘Scotland!’ she cried. ‘It’s lucky I packed mi fur knickers along with the rest of mi trousseau!’

  At the end of a wonderful reception, the guests started to drift away, some to clock on for work on Christmas morning.

  ‘Who cares if we’re tired – it’s been worth it to see our Edna get wed,’ they said as they kissed the happy, smiling bride and groom goodnight.

  Catherine and Marilyn wanted to carry on dancing in their new party frocks, but Flora told them that Santa was on his way and they needed to be tucked up in Nana’s bed before he arrived in Pendleton with his sleigh full of toys.

  ‘Are you coming home to sleep with us, Nana?’ the girls asked, while Flora fastened the buttons on their winter coats.

  ‘I bloody hope not!’ Malc chortled behind his hand.

  ‘No, sweetheart, I’m sleeping with Malc tonight,’ Edna explained.

  ‘Will he keep you warm?’ Catherine asked.

  Edna exchanged a lusty smile with her husband. ‘Don’t you worry, chick, Malc will keep me warm all night long.’

  Singing ‘Jingle Bells’, the little girls and Flora, after promising to meet up in the morning, hurried home through the snow.

  The only guests left were Gladys, Rosa, Nora and Maggie; Kit, exhausted by the long happy day, had gone home with Ian and Billy, the latter having had the time of his life running round the pub’s dance floor all night.

  Crowdin
g around Edna, the girls hugged her, then pulled apart to let her go. ‘Night, night, sweethearts,’ Edna said, then she left the Black Bull on her husband’s arm. ‘Wish me luck!’ she added with a cheeky grin.

  Walking through the falling snow, Edna sighed – she was going home to spend the night with the man she loved. It was to be the perfect end to a very perfect day.

  32. Christmas Day

  Christmas Day on the wards really shouldn’t have been so magical, but for Gladys, somehow it just was.

  She woke up when her alarm went off in midwinter darkness. Groping about for her clothes, which she’d carefully left on a chair at the bottom of the bed, she struggled into the bathroom, where, making as little noise as possible, she washed and dressed. Before leaving, she left her Christmas present for Rosa on the sofa; then, closing the door softly behind her, Gladys stepped into drifts of deep, virgin snow. There was no point in even thinking she could ride her bike through the drifts, so she set off determinedly on foot with a smile on her face. ‘The world is soooo beautiful,’ she thought; here she was in the pre-dawn darkness, watching the stars fade as the sun rose in the east. Slowly, inexorably, the thin slice of light merged into a deep pink as Christmas Day dawned.

  ‘God bless all those brave troops, sailors and pilots; men risking their lives so we can have days like these,’ Gladys thought with humbled tears in her eyes. ‘What will they be waking up to? Mud-churned fields, gangrenous injuries, nothing to eat and no safe place to keep warm.’ She thought of young sailors crossing silver-cold seas deadly with German mines, and pilots flying out on bombing-raids knowing some among their number would never come back.

  The waste of life almost caused Gladys physical pain, but she reminded herself that to call it a waste was not honouring those men serving their country with such heroic ferocity, risking their lives for strangers like her, people they would never meet. With such grateful thoughts in her mind, Gladys ploughed on through the icy drifts, even more determined that she would dedicate her nursing career to the wounded troops shipped home from the casualty clearing stations on the Front line.

  Arriving at the hospital, she relieved her colleague, who gave her an update on their patients: luckily nobody had suffered any mishaps in the night.

  ‘A young lass had a baby,’ her colleague told her with a smile. ‘Born on the chimes of midnight to a munitions worker from the filling shed.’

  Gladys had the pleasure of bathing the new baby boy, whilst his exhausted mum lay in bed drinking the tea and eating the toast that Gladys had prepared for her.

  ‘I thought of calling him Jesus,’ the new mum said without a hint of humour in her voice. ‘Not just cos he was born on Christmas Day, but I honest to God thought I was dying having ’im,’ she said feebly.

  Gladys smothered a smile. ‘Jesus might be a bit tricky,’ she replied diplomatically.

  ‘Mi husband, who’s serving with the Royal Navy on a mine-sweeper God only knows where, said if it was a lad he should be named George, after the king.’

  ‘That’s a nice name,’ said Gladys as she lifted the little pink boy from the warm baby bath and gently wrapped him in a soft towel. Holding the precious bundle to her breast, she inhaled the intoxicating smell of a newborn, fresh-as-a-daisy baby.

  ‘Do you think I could get away with George Jesus?’ the new mother mused.

  ‘I think you should do what makes you happy,’ Gladys said, smothering another smile as she handed the baby – now in a nappy and a little white nightie – back to his mother, who gazed at her son adoringly.

  Gladys slipped away so the young mother could nurse her son in private, and with the smell of the baby still in her nostrils dreamily wondered when she might hold her own newborn child in her arms.

  ‘Honestly!’ she exclaimed under her breath as she emptied the contents of several bedpans down the sluice. ‘Christmas has made me go all broody.’

  After taking temperatures and pulses on the men’s ward, Gladys wrote up her notes on the charts, and to her astonishment found a little present sitting on the end of every bed.

  ‘What’s all this?’ she asked as she noticed the gifts, then the smiling faces of her male patients. ‘What are you up to?’

  ‘Open them and find out,’ an old man called out. ‘They’re all for you’.

  Carefully undoing the wrapping paper so that it could be reused, Gladys smiled in wonder at the small but thoughtful gifts she’d been given: an orange, a small bar of chocolate, some blue ribbon, a tin of talcum powder and a packet of Woodbines. She was quite overcome, and wondered how on earth they had managed to get hold of these things for her when they were so poorly.

  ‘Sorry, Nurse Johnson, it was me that got you the fags,’ a young lad who’d just had his appendix out said with a shy grin, ‘Forgot you didn’t smoke.’

  ‘Thank you, thank you all of you, for your presents – you’ve made my day,’ Gladys said gratefully.

  ‘The sight of your bonny face, Nurse Johnson,’ the young boy said with a gallant smile, ‘makes our day – every day. We just wanted to say thank you, Nurse Gladys,’ he added cheekily. ‘And to wish you a Happy Christmas too.’

  Gladys wiped a tell-tale tear from her eye, thanking her patients from the bottom of her heart and feeling more thankful than ever that circumstances had led to this new career of hers, which she so loved. The only thing that could make this day any better would be the sight of Reggie – oh, and maybe Myrtle too, of course – which she knew was absolutely impossible. Reggie had sent her a lovely Christmas card of St Paul’s Cathedral, miraculously almost completely unscathed by the Luftwaffe. Inside, he’d written: With all my love, your devoted Reggie xxx.

  They’d tried to arrange phone calls, but they all fell through: either Sister Atkins was in her office, where the hospital phone was kept, or Reggie couldn’t leave the operating theatre at the right time to catch her.

  ‘Never mind,’ Gladys said firmly to herself. ‘We’re not the only sweethearts separated by distance, and, as Reggie said, at least he’s not been posted to the Middle East.’

  Strangely enough, this single sentence, which she repeated like a mantra to herself as she went about her daily business, gave her great comfort and optimism. London, compared with the Middle East, where terrible atrocities were taking place, was a mere stone’s throw away. Separation was bearable; in fact, anything was better than the estranged life they’d lived before Gladys finally dropped her guard with Reggie and told him the truth. Even now, she felt a shudder at the thought of evil Captain Miles, but she took a great deal of satisfaction from the knowledge that he had been court-martialled and shamed before his fine naval colleagues. That justice had been seen to be done gave Gladys immense pleasure; she admired and was grateful to the brave girl in the Admiralty who had blown the whistle on her superior officer.

  Back at Yew Tree Farm, Kit lay luxuriously in bed, with Billy beside her rummaging excitedly through his bulging Christmas stocking.

  ‘Happy, darling?’ Ian said as he walked into their bedroom bearing two cups of tea and a mug of milk for Billy on a tray.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Kit sighed as she sat upright and fondled the soft, sage-green silk camisole Ian had bought her. Taking her cup of tea and watching Billy rip his way into a chocolate bar, she said, ‘Wasn’t Edna’s wedding wonderful?’

  ‘It’s hard to imagine a happier and more well-suited couple,’ Ian answered. ‘Well, apart from us,’ he said, kissing his wife on the cheek.

  ‘I have to admit,’ Kit continued, ‘it was hard not to look at Arthur throughout the service. I don’t know how he did it – I would have been in bits.’

  ‘He’s got to be strong, if only for Stevie,’ Ian said softly. ‘The more I think about Arthur going away, the more I agree with his decision; only he can know what is right for the two of them, and if he really feels he’ll be too haunted by the past, then it’s got to be the right thing to move on somewhere new.’

  ‘When you think about it realistically, t
hough,’ Kit said sadly, ‘we’ll probably never see them again.’

  ‘That’s a bit dramatic, darling,’ he retorted.

  ‘I don’t think so. I know we all want to see them, but this feels like the end of a huge chapter in our lives. Violet and her little family will be nothing but memories before we know it,’ she finished mournfully.

  ‘Honestly!’ Ian cried as he tickled his wife in order to bring a smile to her sad face. ‘You and your Irish melancholy!’ But he knew in his heart his sensitive wife was probably right, and agreed it was too sad for words.

  Newly-weds Malc and Edna were also enjoying an early-morning cup of tea in bed; they both had a dreamy, faraway look, as if the memories of their love-making in the night were still clinging to them.

  ‘How are you this morning, Mrs Preston?’

  ‘Never better,’ she answered with a bright smile. ‘I think I’d best be making a move; otherwise we’ll have the grandchildren out looking for us.’

  ‘One more cuddle, my sweetheart,’ said Malc as he drew his wife gently into his arms and kissed her moist, plump lips. ‘Thank you for making me the happiest man on earth,’ he said with an emotional catch in his voice.

  ‘Thank you, my sweetheart,’ she murmured tenderly, then with a giggle she added, ‘Now then, we need to check that red robe fits you – and the beard too!’

  ‘Oh, bloody hell!’ Malc groaned as he rolled on to his back. ‘Is this the end of the honeymoon?’

  ‘You must be joking!’ Edna cried. ‘We’re off to Scotland tomorrow – there’ll be no holding me back once we’ve crossed the border! Now come on, Father Christmas,’ she urged. ‘Get your finger out!’

  As Edna sauntered back to her chip shop with a wide smile on her face, she marvelled at her luck. How could a middle-aged woman going grey and with a definite tummy have snapped up a man as easy-going and generous as her Malc? He was even prepared to dress up as Santa – not many fellas would do that on their honeymoon!

  The Christmas tree in the town square looked prettier than ever now that it was draped in a lacy covering of snow. ‘Soon the locals will be gathered around it,’ thought Edna. ‘Singing carols and eating toffee apples.’ The thought of hungry people put a skip in Edna’s step. ‘Better get a move on, kid,’ she chided herself. She’d got a lot to do, but the first thing on her mind right now was to kiss her granddaughters and wish them a very merry Christmas.